Occupy _______ has been throwing around “the 1 percent” and “the 99 percent.”
I have been writing about the battle between government and Wisconsin taxpayers as “the 15 percent” (the former) and “the 85 percent” (those not part of the 15 percent whose taxes pay the salaries and benefits of the 15 percent).
Here is our America according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
312 million people live here
154 million of us want to work.
141 million of us do work.
109 million of us work in the private sector.
18 million of produce goods.
2 million of us produce food.
Most people are stunned to learn that only 20 million Americans (6.4%) make, mine, build, or grow things. And even that is a bit inflated, as many of the jobs in those companies that make things are administrative positions which exist only to provide information to government agencies and assure compliance with regulations. …
While the unemployment rate can be, and is, manipulated by adjustments and assumptions, the better ratio that really matters in assessing the health of our economy is private sector (wealth producing) employment as a percentage of total population. As we begin 2012, only 34.9% of Americans create the wealth that sustains us all. And not just us, but a goodly part of the rest of the world, too. …
In John F. Kennedy’s Camelot of 1962, government spending on dependency programs – i.e. the safety net – was 28% of the federal budget; last year, it was 70.5%, according to Congressional Budget Office. And he did not have two wars pushing up on the denominator back then. …
How much is enough? In constant dollars (adjusted for inflation), government spending per household has risen 162% since 1964. Federal spending per household is now $29,401 according to Heritage Foundation, and is projected to rise to over $35,000 in less than 10 years. With a median income of $49,000, that level of federal spending is simply unsustainable. It is not a political problem; it is math.
We can’t tax that much, and we can’t borrow that much; the only option left is to inflate the currency and then to hyper-inflate it when inflating it doesn’t work. Our median income will still be $49,000 but the cost of everything will double and triple and our savings will be eaten up. …
The International Monetary Fund lists the United States as the second-worst country in terms of fiscal trajectory – i.e. the amount of current debt plus the rate at which future debt will be accumulated under current fiscal policies. The world has no blueprint for the implosion of an economy too-big-to-fail. When the Roman Empire cratered it ushered in a millennium known as the Dark Ages. A millennium is incomprehensible to a society who can’t make it a half-hour without checking Facebook. This is not going to be pretty. It is not too late to fix it, but you can see too-late from here.
I’m on the side of Wisconsin’s 85 percent. I’m also on the side of the 34.9 percent.
The Super Bowl has become one of the few mass-audience appointment TV events left, to the extent that for several years the Super Bowl commercials have been avidly watched and scrutinized.
The title of best commercial is a matter of personal opinion. The title of most controversial commercial undoubtedly was the halftime Chrysler ad.
Neither Chrysler nor NBC is saying how much the 2-minute spot cost, but 30-second ads were going for $3.5 million. Suffice it to say that the ad cost Chrysler — which, remember, took more than $13 billion of our tax dollars — several million dollars.
I believe this counts as Eastwood’s first media experience with Chrysler products:
Rugged Hollywood icon Clint Eastwood proclaimed it was “Halftime in America” in the spot that did not mention a Chrysler car or truck but intoned that the automaker’s successful turnaround could be used as an example for the United States as it struggles with high unemployment and a slow economic growth rate.
“Detroit’s showing us it can be done,” Eastwood said.
Eastwood — or, more accurately, the script writer — left out the rest of Eastwood’s sentence — “by a bailout funded by non-Chrysler owners to benefit President Obama’s buddies, the United Auto Workers, in time for Fiat of Italy to buy Chrysler.”
(This probably is a good place to explain the headline: The Volaré and Dodge Aspen was the highest-rated, if you want to call it that, Chrysler product on Edmunds Inside Line‘s 100 Worst Cars of All Time list, described as “terribly built and rust-prone” while “subject to a long series of recalls.” One of my Boy Scout Scoutmasters was a Madison police officer, and he told me of an squad that had Aspen logos on one side of the car and Volaré logos on the other wide. I could have included two higher-rated AMC products, the Pacer or Gremlin, but they we”re built before Chrysler bought AMC in 1987.)
If Obama advisor David Axelrod felt compelled to tweet what a wonderful spot it was, then it counts as propaganda, irrespective of the White House’s and Obama campaign’s denials — and for that matter, the denials of Sergio Marchionne, Fiat’s (which means Chrysler’s) CEO, whose company is sticking the taxpayers with billions of dollars that won’t be paid back.
It particularly counts as propaganda on behalf of the unions, who worked hard to destroy their Detroit employers, as Christian Schneider points out:
While most cheeseheads saw the Super Bowl as a rare night off from the sucking hole of union politics, there it was in the ad — an image of the state capitol occupation by union protesters nearly a year ago.
While the video of the capitol’s illuminated east wing plays, Eastwood growls, “I’ve seen a lot of tough eras, a lot of downturns in my life. [Edit. note: “Huh?”] And, times when we didn’t understand each other. It seems like we’ve lost our heart at times. The fog of division, discord, and blame made it hard to see what lies ahead.”
Of course, the “division, discord, and blame,” in Wisconsin began when unions tried the burn the state down over Governor Scott Walker’s plan requiring them to begin paying into their own pension accounts, and to pay a little more toward their health insurance (although still half the private-sector average.) Walker scaled back their ability to collectively bargain, although they still retained more bargaining rights than federal workers, who can’t bargain for wages and benefits.
Everyone knows the results. Union protesters calling the Lieutenant Governor a “f***ing whore” to her husband’s face after a Walker speech. Screeching demonstrators being dragged out while attempting to disrupt Walker’s State of the State address. WWII veterans being greeted with Nazi salutes at a capitol Christmas-tree-lighting ceremony. Protesters disrupting a Walker-led ceremony for Special Olympics award recipients. Forged recall petition signatures. Lawmakers having beers dumped on their heads. The list goes on and on.
According to Chrysler, these are times when we just “didn’t understand each other,” and where both sides can be ascribed “blame.” In fact, it was the union protesters that understood perfectly — that their boorish behavior would probably one day land them in an ad lauding their activism. …
It also seems somewhat incongruous that Chrysler would lionize the Wisconsin union movement in such a way. Organized labor’s pay and benefit demands are what brought U.S. auto makers to their knees in the first place. As George Will is fond of saying, American car companies actually became health-insurance companies that happened to sell automobiles. It’s no coincidence that the American entities who have struggled the most in recent years — car companies, the American educational system — are the ones that are the most heavily unionized. (Wisconsin, of all places, should recognize this, as a major GM plant in Janesville closed in 2008, tearing the heart out of that union town.)
Schneider could have mentioned Milwaukee and Kenosha, which used to have Chrysler plants, but now do not. Wisconsin has no auto assembly plants, which means the $23.6 billion we will lose on the GM and Chrysler bailouts were of no real value to Wisconsin.
Eastwood had his own, uh, clarification Monday to Fox News:
Following the fall out over the controversial Chrysler Super Bowl halftime ad, Clint Eastwood spoke exclusively with O’Reilly Factor producer Ron Mitchell…
“I just want to say that the spin stops with you guys, and there is no spin in that ad. On this I am certain.
l am certainly not politically affiliated with Mr. Obama. It was meant to be a message about just about job growth and the spirit of America. I think all politicians will agree with it. I thought the spirit was OK.
I am not supporting any politician at this time.
Chrysler to their credit didn’t even have cars in the ad.
Anything they gave me for it went for charity.
If any Obama or any other politician wants to run with the spirit of that ad, go for it.”
Evidently Eastwood, formerly known as a conservative/libertarian, misjudged the reaction to the ad. His reaction came out before the late Monday news that Eastwood opposed the Chrysler bailout, according again to Reuters:
“We shouldn’t be bailing out the banks and car companies,” actor, director and Academy Award winner Eastwood told the Los Angeles Times in November 2011. “If a CEO can’t figure out how to make his company profitable, then he shouldn’t be the CEO.” …
Eastwood’s manager Leonard Hirshan said the actor has not changed his views on the auto bailout.
“He did a commercial that had nothing to do with politics,” Hirshan said. “What he did was talk about America. If anything, this was a pro American commercial not a Chrysler commercial. Chrysler just sponsored what he had to say.”
(And if you believe any of these denials, I have a 1970 Plymouth Road Runner Superbird with a 426 Hemi to sell you. It was driven only to church on Sundays.)
Truth be told, the most outrageous part of the ad doesn’t have to do with Chrysler, but with Detroit:
“People are out of work and they’re hurting and they’re all wondering what they’re going to do to make a comeback,” Eastwood said. “The people of Detroit know a little something about this. They almost lost everything. But we all pulled together, now Motor City is fighting again.”
That would be the same Detroit with, as a National Review comment put it, “a downtown that looks like a bombed-out ruin, large tracts of land and ornate buildings in a state of advanced decay, an indicted mayor, and a mass exodus of everyone with the means to escape.”
This ad is, in the words of Karl Rove, who was to George W. Bush what Axelrod is to Obama, “a sign of what happens when you have Chicago-style politics and the president of the United States and his political minions are, in essence, using our tax dollars to buy corporate advertising and the best wishes of the management, which is benefitted by getting a bunch of our money that they’ll never pay back.” Yet it’s unlikely to make much difference in November. It won’t even make a difference in sales of Chrysler products, given that no one is buying cars or other big-ticket items these days unless absolutely necessary.
A former actor whose birthday was yesterday poses the correct question for November:
Republicans like to think that their political worldview is based on time-honored concepts like natural law, freedom and individual rights, and not on craven political considerations.
Unfortunately for the GOP, their presidential race suggests the latter, not the former. How bizarre is it that Newt Gingrich decries Mitt Romney, whose Bain Capital actually created jobs, as a “vulture” capitalist? Whatever happened to rewarding risk and initiative, and praising, not condemning, those who drive the American economy? (And how bizarre is it that Romney can’t put away Gingrich, who got $600,000 from Fannie Mae, the Government Sponsored Enterprise whose fingerprints are all over the late 2000s recession?)
Unfortunately for Romney, he’s not helping his own cause by veering between stereotypical right-wing hardened hearts (he claimed “I’m not concerned about the very poor,” which sounds bad, although I’d be more concerned about the middle class, as he then said he was) and unintelligent liberal ideas (indexing the minimum wage to inflation).
The GOP better figure this out since Romney appears to be on the way to the GOP nomination, lest the GOP blows what follows:
The map is a Washington Examiner extrapolation of the most recent Gallup Poll presidential approval/disapproval numbers. Obama has more negatives than positives in the red states, and if the vote in the presidential election followed those trends, well, Obama better be making plans for his life after Jan. 20.
But the GOP is certainly capable of screwing it up. Despite the fact that the economy is practically guaranteed to not be noticeably better by Election Day (and may become much worse), and despite the fact that Obamacare is tremendously unpopular (for good reason), and despite the fact that Obama’s greatest successes are what he was not able to do (i.e. raise taxes beyond the dozen or so tax increases we’re enjoying now), none of the remaining GOP presidential candidates are able to cross the spot where party popularity translates into electability.
It would help if presidential candidates didn’t demonize one of their core constituencies, the people who will have to pull the economy out of its apparent doldrums. Jim Pethokoukis passes on Ed Yardeni, an economist who attended something called the Distressed Investing Summit and Turnaround Awards Gala:
No one said, “Greed is good.” I did hear one investment banker say that Chapter 11 is good. Bankruptcy is better than liquidation. He observed that in America the legal system is sensibly designed to restructure distressed companies rather than to shut them down. I heard lots of heart-warming stories about how these fearless capitalists took lots of risks to turn companies around by replacing incompetent or corrupt managers with their own management pros.
Yes, in some instances, these fine folks had to fire other fine folks to boost the productivity and competitiveness of their acquired companies. That’s the heartless part of these heart-warming stories. However, in most cases, there were happy endings, which averted both the total liquidation of the enterprises and the termination of all their workers. The remaining employees certainly benefitted when their restructured companies were revived.
When these turnaround artists succeed, they can get very rich by taking their companies public or by selling them to other companies. Again, some workers may lose their jobs in the process, but it beats the alternative. That’s just one important example of how the 1% really do help the 99%. At the end of last year, Wilbur Ross, who is a private-equity billionaire, observed that entrepreneurship and capitalism didn’t cause the financial crisis: He added, “Tearing down the rich does not help those less well-off. If you favor employment, you need employers whose businesses are flourishing.”
… Today, one of the main sources of the economy’s resilience is the availability of so much private equity to purchase and revive distressed companies. Too bad Mitt Romney, who made his fortune as a private equity investor, hasn’t figured out yet how to explain this to the public.
Pethokoukis adds: “Mitt Romney might want to memorize this.” And not just Romney.
I was elected (as the only candidate, the only elections I can win) senior warden of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church. God help us all.
The funniest comments therefrom include:
Did you get all the other candidates thrown off the ballot by opening sealed documents and such?
You have come a long way from milk monitor….
Altar wine for everyone!
Give it a year, and they’ll be passing a recall petition around. This is Wisconsin, you know.
(The third comment, from a UW alum of my era, brings to mind an old saw: “Where there are four Episcopalians, there’s a fifth.” To the last I replied that depending on how things go, I might sign the recall-the-senior-warden petition myself.)
We’ve been members of our church for 12½ years, since our oldest son was a month old and his parents (one raised Catholic, the other raised Congregationalist) decided they needed to attend church more regularly than a single-digit number of times a year. The irony is that I had grandparents who were Episcopalians though I never discussed religion with them; my first Episcopalian experience was picking up a Book of Common Prayer at their house while idly watching TV, and my second was attending my grandfather’s funeral. Never could I have predicted then that less than two decades later our family would be as involved in our church as we are.
The Episcopal Church in the United States of America, spun off from the Church of England at the same time the 13 American colonies spun off themselves from Great Britain, is structured comparably to the federal government. (The Church of England and all Protestant churches are spinoffs from the Roman Catholic Church, of course; some describe ECUSA as “Protestant, Yet Catholic,” and we had a rector who described us as neither Catholic nor Protestant.) Churches choose their rectors or vicars; a diocese’s priests and laity representatives choose their bishops. The national church has a lay House of Deputies and a House of Bishops (made up of, yes, the church’s bishops), analogous to the House of Representatives and Senate. With my election as senior warden for the second time, I have something in common with Franklin Roosevelt, who was also senior warden of St. James Episcopal Church in Hyde Park, N.Y., through his entire presidency. (Neither the U.S. nor St. James had term limits at the time.)
The way that the Episcopal Church chooses its leaders appeals to me, rather than having priests and bishops selected and assigned in a process over which you have absolutely no say. If God approved of dictatorships, He would not have given us free will. Another appeal is ECUSA’s three-sided foundation of Scripture, tradition and reason. (Our rector — think “pastor,” except that in this church the pastor is Jesus Christ — compares Scripture to the big wheel on a tricycle.) In contrast to some denominations inside and outside Christianity, women have full roles in this church, including as priests and the current Presiding Bishop.
I don’t discuss politics at church except with those who wish to discuss it. (It’s a variation of Jesus Christ’s admonition to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and give to God what is God’s.) I find interesting the number of Episcopalians I know who are political liberals yet theological conservatives. (Since I’m about to interject politics, those who object should move on to the 8 a.m. post.)
The Episcopal Church has been doing a curious dance around Occupy Wall Street. It’s safe to say church leadership is generally supportive of the Occupy ends, but not for one of Occupy’s means — occupying, literally, church property near the church known as Trinity Wall Street.
Religious supporters of the Occupy ________ movement(s) are, I think, misguided, not merely for secular political reasons. (No, I am not suggesting that only political conservatives can be Christians. I do notice, though, that most atheists are lefties; as someone on Facebook put it, conservative atheists don’t go to church, while “progressive” atheists want religion to go away entirely.)
I am not a theologian, but my reading of the Bible finds no mandate that the best way to care for the poor is to steal from those who are not poor, even those who are “rich.” In fact, I see no Biblical requirement that government or even society care for the poor; the responsibility of caring for the poor is on individuals. (Who can act collectively, but only by their own choice.) It would be grossly inappropriate for government to decide that the best way to respond to Christ’s admonition in Matthew 19:24, Mark 10:25 and Luke 18:25 about rich men getting into heaven by making everyone poor. Economic equality is not only impossible (as proven in the worker’s paradises in the late Soviet Union and today’s China — countries that were and are officially atheist), it is immoral, as Rabbi Aryeh Spiro observes in the Wall Street Journal:
More than any other nation, the United States was founded on broad themes of morality rooted in a specific religious perspective. We call this the Judeo-Christian ethos, and within it resides a ringing endorsement of capitalism as a moral endeavor. …
The Bible’s proclamation that “Six days shall ye work” is its recognition that on a day-to-day basis work is the engine that brings about man’s inner state of personal responsibility. Work develops the qualities of accountability and urgency, including the need for comity with others as a means for the accomplishment of tasks. With work, he becomes imbued with the knowledge that he is to be productive and that his well-being is not an entitlement. And work keeps him away from the idleness that Proverbs warns leads inevitably to actions and attitudes injurious to himself and those around him.
Yet capitalism is not content with people only being laborers and holders of jobs, indistinguishable members of the masses punching in and out of mammoth factories or functioning as service employees in government agencies. Nor is the Bible. Unlike socialism, mired as it is in the static reproduction of things already invented, capitalism is dynamic and energetic. It cheerfully fosters and encourages creativity, unspoken possibilities, and dreams of the individual. Because the Hebrew Bible sees us not simply as “workers” and members of the masses but, rather, as individuals, it heralds that characteristic which endows us with individuality: our creativity. …
The Bible speaks positively of payment and profit: “For why else should a man so labor but to receive reward?” Thus do laborers get paid wages for their hours of work and investors receive profit for their investment and risk.
The Bible is not a business-school manual. While it is comfortable with wealth creation and the need for speculation in economic markets, it has nothing to say about financial instruments and models such as private equity, hedge funds or other forms of monetary capitalization. What it does demand is honesty, fair weights and measures, respect for a borrower’s collateral, timely payments of wages, resisting usury, and empathy for those injured by life’s misfortunes and charity. …
No country has achieved such broad-based prosperity as has America, or invented as many useful things, or seen as many people achieve personal promise. This is not an accident. It is the direct result of centuries lived by the free-market ethos embodied in the Judeo-Christian outlook.
Many on the religious left criticize capitalism because all do not end up monetarily equal—or, as Churchill quipped, “all equally miserable.” But the Bible’s prescription of equality means equality under the law, as in Deuteronomy’s saying that “Judges and officers … shall judge the people with a just judgment: Do not … favor one over the other.” Nowhere does the Bible refer to a utopian equality that is contrary to human nature and has never been achieved. …
God begins the Ten Commandments with “I am the Lord your God” and concludes with “Thou shalt not envy your neighbor, not for his wife, nor his house, nor for any of his holdings.” Envy is corrosive to the individual and to those societies that embrace it. Nations that throw over capitalism for socialism have made an immoral choice.
Parallels to Spiro’s Old Testament points can be found in the New Testament, of course. (A pastor friend of ours points out that every verse in the Bible, including the aforementioned parable of the talents, is repeated elsewhere in the Bible at least once, except for John 3:16.) Matthew 25 brings readers the parable of the talents. Jesus Christ said in Matthew 5:17, “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill,” which is how His two Great Commandments summarize the Ten Commandments.
This is not to apply secular politics to God. Religious people of all faiths and political worldviews should remember Abraham Lincoln’s counsel: “In every conflict between human beings both sides claim God is on their side. One side must be, and both sides may be wrong. I only pray we are on his side.”
Big Government thinks what President Obama claims to be a recovery isn’t:
The national unemployment rate is now 8.5% (December’s), its lowest level since January 2009, but while some saw this welcome news as something to celebrate, it hides a much darker economic picture: the jobs report vastly undercounts the unemployment rate. Moreover, as of this writing, we don’t know if December’s jobs report is a trend, or if, as some economists predict, economic growth will slow in the first quarter of 2012, forestalling some of the gains made. In November, the unemployment rate fell from 9% to 8.6%, but this was not due to an increase in jobs, but due to a decrease in the numbers of people “actively seeking” them. …
In December 2007, the U.S. economy employed 146 million; today, four years later, it employs 140 million. The population has grown; the number of jobs has declined.
No economy is sustainable under the conditions in those last two sentences.
But wait! There’s more!
Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Spence and co-author Sandile Hlatshwayo estimate that from 1990 to 2008 all net job creation has been in the “non-tradable sector,” chief among them health care and government jobs. Alas these sectors aren’t known for their productivity and are hardly the jobs that can propel the growth necessary to accommodate a new workforce. The manufacturing jobs which once went to the growing middle class is getting more productive—but with fewer workers and more machines. In 2009—the height of the recession—productivity in U.S manufacturing increased by 7.7%, more than any other country followed by the Bureau of Labor. America’s share of world manufacturing stood at 20% in 2009, down only 2%.
More skepticism comes from Ace of Spades HQ, commenting on Newt Gingrich:
For me, it was the part where he stood up for work. Where he discussed the essential virtues of work. Nobody does that anymore. It was refreshing. It was important to me to hear someone say it. To hear that someone has a f*cking clue what’s going on down here in Realityland. We are out of work and we want it.
This administration seems to think that Americans should view work as a vampire perceives holy water, and nearly every policy out of DC reflects that.
Well, we don’t think that way. We’re Americans. We want to work. Dammit, we’re ready to get back to it. Give us the reins to our own lives, stick your food stamps back in your ass where they came from, and get out of the way. You’re killing us.
This message resonates. That’s why Gingrich won. Not just the slap at ‘the elites,’ but the content of the slap. The part where all work is good work and no one should consider themselves demeaned by what is *good.* Yeah, that may have been pre-formulated, and Juan Williams walked right into it. So? It needed to be said. Most of us thoroughly enjoyed hearing it clearly and unambiguously elucidated.
Currently, several of my friends and family are out of work, or underemployed. I’ve never seen things this bad in my life. Many of my clients who are technically self-employed simply have had nothing to do for the past three years. They are depleting their savings and selling family heirlooms at auction, while they make pocket cash at a department store to get by.
Meanwhile, the OWS crowd is complaining that no one has coronated them with cushy positions and free stuff the minute they got out of college, and resent the implication that they might have to work some menial jobs for a while until they get their stuff together, the way most everybody else in this country has had to for generations.
This is bad. This is real bad. There’s an ideological rot in this country, eating away at our vitality and encouraging parasitism and sloth. The only reason Obama has gotten away with implementing his job-killing agenda is because a lot of damn people need to get their heads right. Newt Gingrich put his finger on a raw nerve, and was rewarded for it.
Newt Gingrich supposedly engaged in race-baiting when he said:
“I believe every American of every background has been endowed by their Creator with the right to pursue happiness, and if that makes liberals unhappy, I’m going to continue to find ways to help poor people learn how to get a job, learn how to get a better job, and learn someday to own the job.”
To that, replies National Review’s Jonah Goldberg:
… I think people haven’t really figured out that one big reason people appreciate Gingrich’s talk about the importance of work is this: Conservatives really like work. Liberals really like “jobs.”
That’s a subtle distinction for some, but I think it’s a major cultural and sociological divide. Conservatives don’t see too much nobility in poverty (though they don’t necessarily see shame in it either). Liberals treat poverty like it is a sacrament of some kind. Conservatives emphasize habits of the heart. Liberals emphasize material conditions. Liberals exalt labor unions, whose purpose is to maximize the number of jobs offered but curtail as much as possible the amount of work required to get a paycheck. Conservatives think jobs should be allotted based entirely on merit. Liberals think jobs should be allotted based, at least in part, on considerations of need, race, and gender.
When Gingrich talks about the glories of work, it resonates with conservative audiences on a host of levels that have absolutely nothing to do with race. Indeed, for me and I think a lot of conservatives, the reason we find the racial aspects of the argument compelling is that we have a serious and humane concern for the plight of inner-city blacks. I don’t know many conservatives who don’t believe in their bones that if poor blacks from broken homes could just have the same work ethic and values as, say, immigrant Koreans, they would be significantly better off (and they feel the same way about poor whites from broken homes!). A liberal hears that and thinks it’s simply racist. But that’s not how it is intended. And this isn’t to say there aren’t other factors at play, but conservatives side with Booker T. Washington while liberals side with W.E.B. Du Bois. It breaks my heart that Republicans haven’t been better at embracing the Washingtonian tradition.
That’s not to say there hasn’t been progress. Herman Cain represents the Booker T. Washington tradition and that’s one reason why he’s such a natural fit in the Republican party.
And so does Clarence Thomas. There’s a wonderful scene in Thomas’s memoirs. When he was just a little kid growing up in abject poverty (his mother could barely put food on the table), he and his brother were left homeless by a fire. His grandfather agreed to take them in. He told Thomas, then seven years old and hardly living the good life, that his “damn vacation is over.” Thomas’s grandfather believed in backbreaking work. “Never let the sun catch you in bed.” I have never met a conservative who doesn’t eat that stuff up.
Yes, of course, there are plenty of hardworking liberals and slothful conservatives. My only point is that the rhetoric of conservatism has frequencies that liberals have a hard time hearing. What they think is a dog-whistle about race is in fact clarion call about the virtues of work, for blacks and whites alike.
We’ve seen a variation of this in Wisconsin during Recallarama. Democrats persist under the delusion that all jobs, private-sector or public-sector, are alike. They are not. The economic benefits of public-sector jobs are canceled by the tax costs of those jobs. At best, public-sector jobs are an economic wash. (And public-sector jobs are not “public service,” because “service” means doing something for no reward. Public employees are paid.)
The Wall Street Journal’s Holmen W. Jenkins Jr. explains “private equity,” which GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich calls “vulture capital”:
As a rule, private equity takes on the most troubled companies because turning them around offers the biggest profit opportunities. That’s why private equity tends to generate more than its share of traumatic headlines. Look no further than Ripplewood Holdings’ decision to put the maker of Twinkies into bankruptcy this week. It’s the kind of decision that, were Ripplewood’s principals ever to run for office, would get them savaged in an ad.
But guess what? Ripplewood also bought the company, Hostess Brands, out of bankruptcy three years ago, when it was called Interstate Bakeries. Ripplewood is just the latest manager to wrestle unsuccessfully with the company’s fundamental problem, a unionized workforce in an industry where competitors aren’t unionized. …
But the best antidote to foolish thinking about job creation is the work of economists Steven J. Davis and John Haltiwanger. Their painstaking research has revealed a side of America’s dynamism that isn’t always pretty. Between 1977 and 2005, years roughly overlapping Mr. Romney’s business career, some 15% of all jobs were destroyed every year, even as total jobs grew by an average of 2% a year. Job creation and destruction are both relentless, the authors showed in paper after paper. The small difference between the two is what we call prosperity.
But now Republicans are worried. To fault Mr. Romney for being involved with businesses that both grew and shrank, that created jobs and destroyed them, may be to fault him for having eaten from the tree of knowledge in a way that, say, President Obama has not. But how will his story fare in November against Mr. Obama’s simpler story, in which ravenous capitalists destroy jobs and government creates them with things like the Detroit/UAW bailout, solar subsidies and health-care mandates? …
[Romney] put his talent for calm, careful analysis to work helping American businesses adapt to the onrushing challenges of globalization and technological change. Looking back, it may even be true that his ratio of jobs created to jobs destroyed was better than the economy’s as a whole.
What does this have to do with the presidency? Perhaps not much, but one thing he didn’t learn at Bain Capital was to twiddle his thumbs because taking action might make somebody mad at him. That’s not the worst qualification to bring to the Oval Office right now.
Since the 1960s, only one American corporation has independently begun to produce steel on a large scale, and Bain Capital deserves a good deal of the credit for its success. … Though it’s impossible to say what effect Mitt Romney’s work at Bain Capital has had on American industry overall, he can point to at least one success story in an ailing American industry: Steel Dynamics. …
Keith Busse, now chairman of SDI, made his reputation in the 1980s as an executive at Nucor, one of the largest steel firms in the U.S., pioneering a new type of steel mill, “mini-mills,” which use electric-arc furnaces instead of blast furnaces, an innovation that giants such as Bethlehem Steel had not embraced. After he was passed over for promotion in 1993, he and two of his colleagues began discussing the possibility of striking out on their own. They saw potential in mini-mill technology, which had typically been used for applications such as automobile manufacturing, as a way to produce higher-grade steel at a much lower cost. …
Just 19 months after the initial funding was raised, in January 1996, SDI began production. Seven months later, it managed to turn a profit, and the company held an initial public offering in November of that year. Bain held on to all of its shares as the company continued to grow, using the capital raised to open two new mills of different types in 1997 and 1998. …
In 1999, Bain Capital sold its stake in SDI for $104 million, generating an internal rate of return for investors of 55.4 percent (my calculation, without dividends and consulting fees). Since then, SDI has continued to grow, and it generated $6.3 billion in revenue in 2011 while employing more than 6,000 American workers. … SDI’s technology has provided a way for American steel producers to compete. The success of SDI has even helped fuel a virtuous cycle — a true job creator, Busse has used some of his wealth to endow a range of engineering professorships and entrepreneurial-studies centers at Indiana universities.
Larry Kudlow sees a troubled “company” that needs a Bain-style revamp:
There’s a very troubled company out there called U.S. Government, Inc.It’s teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. And it badly needs to be taken over and turned around. It probably even needs the services of a good private-equity firm, with plenty of experience and a reasonably good track record in downsizing, modernizing, shrinking staff, and making substantial changes in management. Yes, layoffs will be a necessary part of the restructuring.
A quick look at the income statement of this troubled firm tells the story. Just in the past year (FY 2011) the firm spent $3.7 trillion, but took in only $2.2 trillion in sales revenues. Hence its deficit came to $1.5 trillion.
Just in the first three months of the new year (FY 2012), the firm’s troubles continued. Outlays for all purposes came in at $874 billion, but income was only $554 billion. So the shortfall was $320 billion. No hope of a self-imposed turnaround here. Indeed, both the senior management and the board of directors show no signs of making major changes to their business strategy. …
In fact, the total debt of this firm now equals its total income — an unsustainable position that suggests to many observers that future financing needs will not be met. …
Anyone operating in business knows full well that even the smartest reorganizing firms are prone to failure as well as success in our free-market capitalist system. But the customer base of the troubled U.S. Government, Inc. seems like it is desperate enough to go the takeover route.
I think I have found my favorite candidate for president.
Unfortunately, he’s not eligible, because he’s not an American. He is Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and not just because of his parents’ fine choice of first name.
On New Year’s Day, while Americans were sleeping off their hangovers, Canada achieved its goal of having the most business-friendly tax system of the Group of Seven (G-7) nations — which include, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States.
On January 1st, Canada’s federal corporate tax rate automatically fell to 15 percent from 16.5 percent as the last installment of a series of corporate rate cuts launched in 2006 by the administration of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. When Harper initiated his campaign, Canada’s overall corporate tax rate was 33.9 percent according to the OECD, third-lowest in the G-7. The federal corporate rate was 22 percent and the average provincial rate was 11.8 percent. Today, Canada now has an overall corporate tax rate of 25 percent, the lowest rate of the G-7 nations.
Harper’s opponents said the same thing that American politicians say when the subject of reducing business taxes come up — too much revenue will be lost, government needs the money more than individuals, blah, blah, blah. So imagine the surprise to find, according to The Globe and Mail:
Remarkably, the gradual lowering of the corporate tax rate appears to have resulted in little loss in corporate tax revenue (when compared with long-term, prerecession revenues). …
By 2010–2011, federal corporate tax revenue reached $30-billion, substantially more than the average of $25-billion in the last four years of the prior Liberal [Party] government: 2002 through 2005. Further, federal corporate tax revenue equalled 1.8 per cent of Canadian gross domestic product, a much higher percentage than the revenue produced during the recessionary years in the early 1990s. In tough-times 1992, for example, corporate revenue, with higher tax rates, fell to 1 per cent of GDP.
Economists predictably disagree on the economic importance of corporate tax rates, mostly on an ideological basis, but it makes good sense to keep this particular tax as low as possible. These taxes, after all, are a direct cost of doing business — and Canada’s corporate cuts ensure that this country will have a cross-border edge for the next two or three years at least. With a combined federal-state rate of 39.2 per cent, the United States has the second-highest rate in the world (after Japan, with 39.5 per cent).
Our 39.2-percent rate is only the federal rate. The actual rate is higher because of the added state corporate income taxes — 7.9 percent in Wisconsin’s case. When you add state rates, businesses pay from 39.2 percent (Nevada, South Dakota, Washington and Wyoming have no corporate income tax) to 49.19 percent (Pennsylvania), which gives the U.S. the highest, not second highest, corporate income taxes in the world. (Other states, such as Ohio, tax not corporate income, but gross receipts, which are still taxes businesses must pay — or, more accurately, businesses’ customers must pay.)
Canada is not the only country to get the idea of reducing business taxes:
Canada can only revel in its lowest-tax status for a few months because on April 1st, Great Britain will lower its corporate rate to 25 percent from 26 percent. Britain’s rate is scheduled to fall even further to 23 percent by 2014. Over the past six years, the only G-7 nations that have not cut their corporate tax rate are France, Japan, and the United States. Japan and the U.S. have combined corporate rate over 39 percent. …
The drive by Canada and the U.K. to have the lowest corporate tax rates in the G-7 cannot be ignored. Canada is, after all, our largest trading partner, and the U.K. is our sixth-largest trading partner. Perhaps not so coincidentally, China — America’s second-largest trading partner — also has a corporate tax rate of 25 percent, nearly 15 percentage points lower than the U.S. rate.
Businesses use profits in one or more of three ways — reinvestment back into the business, increased compensation for employees, or dividends to shareholders (which comprise half of U.S. households). Any of those uses is better than giving the money to the government., particularly a government run by Democrats who see business as (1) a source of consequence-free tax revenue and/or (2) a necessary evil.
Tim Nerenz suspects a conspiracy between the feds and opponents of Gov. Scott Walker, and for good reason:
Recently, the Bureau [of Labor Statistics] named Wisconsin as the state with the worst job loss in November, with a decline of 14,600. This came on the heels of 9,700 jobs BLS reported lost in October. The Badger State’s two-month total of 24,300 jobs lost led the nation in workplace suckage; and opponents of Wisconsin Governor Walker eagerly jumped on the November BLS presser to bolster their sagging effort to recall him.
One anonymous commenter on my blog site asked me (ok, taunted) what I had to say about those BLS numbers, since I had just written a piece opposing the recall. Instead of reading the BLS press release, I visited the underlying data tables (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/laus.t03.htm) and discovered a slightly different story.
The BLS data show that Wisconsin’s workforce dropped from 3,057,800 in September to 3,055,200 in November, while the number of unemployed in Wisconsin fell from 238,600 to 223,800. Since the workforce is only made up of two parts — the employed and the unemployed — simple subtraction reveals there were 2,819,200 people working in September and 2,831,400 in November.
Do you see what’s wrong with this picture?
That’s right — the BLS data shows an increase of 12,200 jobs during those two months, not the loss of 24,300 reported to the press by the union humps who run the joint. I asked them for an explanation — two bucks says I will hear from Dick Clark again before I get any response from the humble public servants who work for me. Five bucks says no journalist will even bother to ask.
The BLS data reconciles perfectly; unemployment drops by 14,800 because 12,200 jobs are added and 2,600 leave the workforce (retire, move out of state, go back to school, etc.). On the other hand, I could find no combination of numbers that can be tortured into a computation of a 24,300 job loss in October/November. If you can crack the code, I will be happy to print the recipe here at Moment of Clarity.
Why would the BLS report something different from its own statistics?
So I am not surprised that the BLS data does not support its agency heads’ pressers. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to guess at possible reasons why Obama appointees at the Department of Unions might want to propagandize against the nation’s top union buster, Governor Walker. Or perhaps it was just a simple error — two months in a row. Yeah … yeah, that’s the ticket.
And don’t even get on your high horse, Demski’s; it’s not about you. I don’t care if they are Republican, Democrat, or just members of the Permanent Government Workers Party, they say whatever they want if it serves their own interest. If my Libertarian party ever took control, we would soon be corrupted too; human nature does not grant waivers to humans.
That’s why we need to shut it all down; all but the 18 essential services authorized by the Constitution. Put the Department of Labor and its Bureau of Labor Statistics high on the list of first to go. If you want accurate labor statistics, buy them from Manpower; they are a private sector firm that makes their living by accurately assessing job markets. They are not too big to fail, so they have to get it right.
The last Presteblog of 2011 is called That Was the Year That Was 2011, a tradition of the Marketplace of Ideas column from 1994 to 2000 and then of the Marketplace of Ideas blog from 2008 to 2010.
The title comes from the British TV series “That Was the Week that Was,” a weekly satirical series that made David Frost and Roy Kinnear popular:
While the TWTYTW 2010 blog no longer exists (ask my former employer what happened to it), a video version of sorts does still exist courtesy of FDL Podcasting:
There was one prediction that I didn’t make — the creation of this blog for the reason you all know. For what it’s worth, this blog is nine months old today. This was not how I planned to spend three-fourths of 2011, but someone once said that if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.
I also didn’t predict that I’d be on Facebook, and I don’t believe Google+ existed when this blog began. The former has been more satisfying than the latter, largely because Facebook has allowed me to reconnect with people I’d lost track of, in one case, from middle school. (That, I should point out, includes the one Facebook Friend I deFriended, and the one Facebook Friend who deFriended me. The latter was because my political views angered him for the last time; the first was because he was as much of an idiot on Facebook — unless you think a 45-year-old fan of “The Jersey Shore” is not incredibly strange, that is — as he was in high school. C’est la vie.)
This is an opinion blog, which means readers get opinions here every day, whether about federal or state politics, American or Wisconsin business, food and drink (I’m in favor of both), motor vehicles, the media, music, sports (particularly the Packers and Badgers), and whatever else comes to my mind. As I’ve written before, after the best thing someone can tell a reader — something like “I enjoy your work and I agree with you” — the second best thing someone can tell a writer is something along the line of “I read your stuff, and you are absolutely wrong.” (I’m getting a lot of that recently; can’t imagine why.) The worst thing someone can tell a writer is something like “You write? I’ve never read your stuff.” My blog software tells me that people are reading this blog, whether they agree with what I write or not.
I continue to be what (at least) two people have called me: a “media ho’.” I occasionally appear on WTMJ-TV’s “Sunday Insight with Charlie Sykes” …
… and Wisconsin Public Radio’s Friday Week in Review, and, twicethis month, WTDY in Madison. That is the logical result of never saying no to a media invitation, I guess. This is also a personal blog, so readers have gotten to read (or, if you like, have had to endure) the unusual facets of my past in small-town newspapers (including my biggest story), radio and sports announcing.
I’m pretty sure the largest number of blog entries this year (other than the daily “Presty the DJ” pieces) involved state politics. We endured several state Senate recalls (all but two of which were unsuccessful) because of the efforts of Gov. Scott Walker and Republicans to undo the disaster area that was state finance under the Doyle (mis)administration and the 2009–10 Legislature. The 15 percent of state workers who work for government had a different opinion, as Christian Schneider notes:
The year began with an appeal for more civility in politics, in the wake of the shooting of Arizona Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Yet when the Capitol explosion began in mid-February, Walker and legislators of both parties started receiving death threats. State Sen. Spencer Coggs called Walker’s plan “legalized slavery,” and state Sen. Lena Taylor (along with dozens of protesters) compared Walker to Adolf Hitler. A Democratic Assemblyman yelled “you’re fucking dead” to a Republican colleague on the chamber floor following debate on Walker’s plan. Protesters targeted Walker’s children on Facebook, and Republican Rep. Robin Vos was assaulted with a flying pilsner.
So shocking was Walker’s plan that President Barack Obama criticized the governor, deeming it an “assault” on unions. Yet if Walker was a first-time union assailant, Obama continues to be a serial offender — federal employees aren’t allowed to collectively bargain for wages and benefits. …
During the summer, unions spent over $20 million to unseat six Republican state senators who voted for Walker’s plan. This exposed exactly why it’s about the money. Government employees merely serve as conduits for taxpayer funds to work their way to the unions, who then spend money electing obeisant legislators to negotiate favorable contracts. Shockingly, lefty “good government” groups appear not to have a problem with this blatant purchase of favors.
It was a year that granted the definition of the word “democracy” a previously unimaginable elasticity. While bullhorns around the Capitol blared “this is what democracy looks like,” 14 Democratic state senators fled to Illinois to prevent democracy from occurring. Later, a single Dane County judge would overturn Walker’s law, which irony-deficient Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca called “a huge win for democracy in Wisconsin.” The law would later be reinstated by an incredulous state Supreme Court. …
2011 was the year that public-sector bargaining became a fundamental human right, bestowed on the people of Wisconsin from the heavens. “We will not be denied our God-given right to join a real union,” thundered Marty Beil, head of the Wisconsin State Employees Union, in February.
Yet God apparently first appeared in Wisconsin in 1959, when Democratic Gov. Gaylord Nelson signed the nation’s first public-sector collective bargaining law. It was a shrewd political move — four years earlier, unions had financed 55% of unsuccessful Democrat William Proxmire’s gubernatorial campaign. The year before Nelson created the law, Democrats had a $10,000 deficit in their state account; four years later, that had turned into a $50,000 surplus. At the time, it looked a lot less like a divine right and more like a naked political favor. (God has yet to visit 24 other states, which either have limited or no public-sector collective bargaining at all.)
Public-sector unions want you to believe that they are synonymous with public-sector employees. They are not. No self-respecting professional teacher should want to have anything to do with teacher unions, the biggest blight upon our educational system. That’s my opinion, but that was also the opinion of the late Steve Jobs.
One should never expect the unvarnished truth during the political process, but unions and their apparatchiks took falsehoods to new depths during Recallarama. Unfortunately for unions, evidence contrasting their assertions existed online. Unfortunately for Democrats and unions and other lefties, the more than $40 million they spent succeeding in reducing the state Senate Republican margin from 19–14 to 17–16, or 16 Republicans, 16 Democrats and one RINO, Dale Schultz.
One should never expect ideological or philosophical consistency from human beings, so keep that in mind when you read tributes to the Occupy ______ types. Most of the same people falling all over themselves praising the protesters were singing quite a different tune when the tea party movement began in 2009. Other than the obvious ideological differences, the biggest difference between Occupy _____ and the tea party movement is that the tea party movement succeeded in electing its candidates in November 2010. Occupy _____ has not one single electoral win and not one single political accomplishment yet. That includes Red Fred Clark, who a majority of 14th Senate District voters foundwanting.
One should never expect politicians to do what they say they’re going to do immediately (or perhaps not at all), but Walker doesn’t deserve an A grade yet. The state’s business climate rankings are better than they were a year ago, but 24th, 25th, 38th and 40th, with a C grade, is not nearly good enough. Until Wisconsin gets consistent top five rankings, Wisconsin will continue to trail the nation in business creation and per capita personal income growth, Wisconsinites will continue to suffer from excessive unemployment and insufficient income, and state and local governments will continue to lack the kind of revenue that comes from a healthy economy.
Speaking of the economy, it is in “recovery,” if that’s what you want to call it. The brilliance of the Obama administration is demonstrated in the current national unemployment rate of 8.6 percent, after nearly three years of the stimulus that stimulus supporters guaranteed would reduce unemployment below 8 percent. Since everyone who was paying attention knew that one major argument for the stimulus was to trade job creation now for higher unemployment (during a theoretically recovered economy) later, you can safely conclude there will be no improvement in unemployment for the foreseeable future. The “jobless recovery” has been predicted for three decades; well, it’s here now, which means that the economy will not be noticeably better in consumer spending generally or purchasing of big-ticket items specifically.
As usually happens, a number of stories didn’t get the attention they should, as WND.com notes:
1. The true rate of unemployment and inflation and the real state of the U.S. economy, which is far worse than reported.
The figure was five times the 2010 gross domestic product of the United States and exceeded the estimated gross domestic product for the world by approximately $14.4 trillion, according to economist John Williams.
The difference between the $1.3 trillion “official” 2010 federal budget deficit numbers and the $5.3 trillion budget deficit is that the official budget deficit is calculated on a cash basis, where all tax receipts, including Social Security tax receipts, are used to pay government liabilities as they occur.
“The government cannot raise taxes high enough to bring the budget into balance,” Williams said. “You could tax 100 percent of everyone’s income and 100 percent of corporate profits and the U.S. government would still be showing a federal budget deficit on a GAAP accounting basis.”
What’s more, the seasonally-adjusted rate adjusted for long-term discouraged workers – who were defined out of official existence in 1994 – was more than 22 percent in November.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics broadest measure of unemployment, which includes the short-term discouraged and other marginally attached works, along with part-time workers who can’t find full-time employment is more than 15 percent.
Methodological shifts in government reporting also have depressed reported inflation. If inflation were calculated the way it was in 1990, the annual rate would be nearly 7 percent. …
7. The real impact on the U.S. economy of Obama’s $787 billion stimulus.
While the Recovery Act boosted the economy in the short term, the extra debt generated by the stimulus “crowds out” private investment and “will reduce output slightly in the long run – by between 0 and 0.2 percent after 2016.”
The Obama administration had promised that at the peak of spending, 3.5 million jobs would be produced. …
8. The harmful impact of unions on the American economy.
“The most fundamental fact about labor unions is that they do not create any wealth,” he said.
Sowell pointed to a bill the Obama administration is trying to push through Congress, called the “Employee Free Choice Act,” as the best example of “the utter cynicism of the unions and the politicians who do their bidding.”
“Employees’ free choice as to whether or not to join a union is precisely what that legislation would destroy,” he said. …
While private-sector workers, using secret-ballot elections, have increasingly voted against being represented by unions in secret-ballot elections, government unions continue to thrive as taxpayers “provide their free lunch.” …
In September, Teamsters union President James Hoffa, addressing a large Labor Day rally, brazenly proclaimed that labor unions – especially the huge government employee unions like the 3-million-member National Education Association and 2-million-member Service Employees International Union – provide the ground troops in the ongoing war to “fundamentally transform” America into a socialist utopia.
“President Obama, this is your army! We are ready to march! Let’s take these son-of-a-b*tches out and give America back to an America where we belong,” he shouted, referring to the tea party movement.
The Obama administration has been generously “funding” the union army since the inauguration, from the General Motors bailout, which blatantly favored union workers, to Obamacare, whose burdensome new regulations don’t apply to many unions thanks to special White House waivers. Obama’s early executive order required all federal agencies to accept construction bids only from contractors who agree to use union workers, and he packed the D.C. bureaucracy with union officials.
Thank heavens for the current state of sports in Wisconsin. The Brewers got into the National League Championship Series (a place I predict they will not revisit soon), the Badgers are playing in their second consecutive Rose Bowl Monday (for my prediction, see this space Monday morning), and the Packers are the number one seed in the NFC playoffs a season after their fourth Super Bowl win. (I’ll have more to write about their next Super Bowl opportunity in January.) For those of us who endured such football as in 1988 (the Packers were 4–12 and the Badgers were 1–10), this still has an air of unreality to it.
Other interesting (and better) things happened in 2011. Our family set a personal record by heading for the basement three times as the tornado sirens went off for a non-test. The first happened while our German/French (now Italian) foreign exchange student was here. My, uh, freer schedule allowed me to go on field trips with our kids, including a church camp.
On to the year to come. I predict that the current economy will not be enough to get a majority of voters to fire Obama and his toadies. (Even if I run.) Too many Americans are still enthralled with the promise of Obama, even though the performance is best noted by his failures, and even though his biggest accomplishment (if that’s what you want to call it), ObamaCare, is tremendously unpopular with voters. (Perhaps they’ll start noticing when their employers drop employee health insurance, which will begin happening this coming year.)
The second reason for my prediction is that the Republicans are not exactly blowing the socks off voters through the interminable presidential-candidate-selection process, are they? There is no way in hell I will vote for Obama, and nor should you, but I can’t say there is a single GOP candidate I support for any reason than the fact that that candidate is not Obama. The fact that other voters feel like I do will be shown by support for a third-party — maybe more than one, in fact — candidate for president, including possibly Republican-turned-Libertarian Gary Johnson, Republican-about-to-turn-Libertarian Ron Paul, and Donald Trump.
Democrats shouldn’t jump for joy, though, because Republicans will not only retain the House of Representatives, but they will win the Senate in November. The demographic realities of the 2012 and 2014 Senate races will mean that, if my prediction (Obama’s winning with less than 50 percent of the popular vote) is correct, the gridlock you see in Washington will continue for most of this decade. I hope you enjoy it.
By the end of 2012, Wisconsin Democrats and their comrades will discover that Recallarama part deux was bad strategy, because whatever money they spend on defeating Walker in a recall election (which will result in Walker’s winning, by the way) cannot be used for (1) the U.S. Senate election, featuring socialist U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D–Madison); (2) efforts to unseat freshman U.S. Reps. Sean Duffy (R–Ashland) and Reid Ribble (R–Sherwood); efforts to win back (3A) the state Senate and (3B) Assembly by recall or by the November election; and, oh, by the way, (4) Obama’s campaign in this supposedly swing state.
It would be nice if Democratic and Republican office-holders and candidates would engrave in their brains article 1, section 22 of the state Constitution, which I repeat here for those Wisconsinites ignorant of it:
The blessings of a free government can only be maintained by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.
My longer-term prediction is that this scorched-earth politics of ours will be reality for the foreseeable future, both at the national and state levels. Politics today is a zero-sum game — one side wins, the other side loses. How do you get past that, particularly when one side seeks to steal from the other? (That is exactly what Occupy ______ wants to do, either because they believe that’s how to solve unsolvable income and wealth inequality, or because they’re thieves at heart.) The 2011 Legislature is the direct result of the 2009–10 Legislature and its abuses of taxpayers, and whenever Democrats regain control of the Legislature, they will stick it to Republicans and their allies however, whenever and wherever they can. That wasn’t how politics worked when I was a UW Political Science student, but it is now.
The way I always end That Was the Year That Was is with these words: May your 2012 be better than your 2011. That may seem to be a low standard. That may also not be possible.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 