Rebane's Ruminations

Debt Crisis – The knives are still out

George Rebane

This weekend President Obama has told ol’ Harry to cool it and reinserted himself into the debt limit talks.  I think that the tea party message has finally gotten through, though not in its entirety.  Leaked compromises still consist of immediate debt limit increases that won’t be matched by spending cuts until many years down the line, if then.  If Obama gets gets a second term, all bets on the economy and fiscal responsibility are off – spending increases, tax increases, regulatory increases, and limitless borrowing - next stop Depression 2.0.  Come to think of it, this is about much more than upping the debt limit, maybe that's why the knives are still out. 

The current standoff has been perfectly captured by Nevada County's RL ‘Bob’ Crabb in the cartoon below that first appeared in the 30jul11 Union where we regularly enjoy his political and social insights.  (Bob also makes lexicographic contributions as a commenter on these pages.)

CCB Lite passes – 218 to 210 (updated 30jul2011)

George Rebane

Cut, Cap & Balance Lite just passed the House 218 to 210 with no Dems voting for it, and 22 Repubs opposing it.  The tea party backed Repubs came and took the heat to the end, they would not vote for an increase in the debt ceiling.  Why?  Because our continuing to borrow with no plan to pay back is what will pull the country down, and even CCB Lite won’t fix that.  That is what will cause our credit rating to be downgraded, not the piddly crap going on in Washington this weekend.

So now we have the ongoing Beltway game that’s over the heads of most Americans –

- The President bloviates (nothing scorable),
- The House Legislates,
- The Senate Kills Bills.

Academic political scientists are telling us that there is less overlap between the Dems and Repubs than there has been since the 1890s (the beginning of the American progressive movement).  However, one thing we can all celebrate in this epochal national debate on how we citizens want to relate to government is that these bills focus on the real ideological differences between our political parties.  There is no pork appended to any of these bills CCB and CCB Lite.  Therefore there is no back room deal making and back slapping as votes are traded ONLY for the purpose of insuring re-election.

As Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid goes into the weekend to pass his smoke-and-mirrors cuts alternative, for the first time in 30 years the issues on the national fisc and governance are singular, clear, and complete.  No cuts?  Yeah, you heard the way he added savings to his spending cuts column from the presumed halt of the mid-east campaigns.  Well, the Repubs can come back with a ‘I’ll see ya and raise ya’, and claim that we could have had NASA launch a $30T program to put a man on the Sun in this decade.  And since we’re not going to do that, we’re going to cut $30T from future budgets.  Put those cuts in our column please.

[update] Without debate, the Senate killed it.  BTW, H/T to RR reader who sent the following -

Conservative star Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) ripped Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for the fantasy savings in his budget plan.

“Let’s pass a bill to cover the moon with yogurt that will cost $5 trillion today. and then let’s pass a bill the next day to cancel that bill. We could save $5 trillion.”

Great minds and all that.  I guess my little fantasy was not that far off the heavy thinking going on in Washington during these hours.

[30jul2011 update]  I'm happy to report that our congressman Tom McClintock was one of the 22 Repubs voting NO on CCB Lite.  These one shots to reduce spending by a skosh over ten years along with no provision for stopping the national debt going up forever are a joke.  Such legislation will give our creditors no greater comfort, and therefore not affect our credit rating one way or the other.  'Give us more money so we can pay our interest on what we already owe you, and forget about getting back the  principal.' is what passes for fiscal policy in Greece.

930AM - Just received this document (Download S_627 Extended version_29jul11) from Congressman Tom McClintock that analyzes CCB Lite, gives the rationale for the congressman's no vote, and outlines a future course of action.

Cultural Rights

George Rebane

[This piece is actually the expansion of ‘Discussing Norway and Breivik’ which invited a reasoned conversation about the recent terror massacre.  In there I included 25 notions related to that atrocity, and to the growing public debate on multi-culturalism and Islam that is ongoing in Europe and starting in America.  Here is my contribution to the first on this list of 25 that invites other views.]

OK, let me take a stab at #1 - The right of a culture to endure and thrive in its homeland.

To give some structure to what follows, I accept that a society is “a system of human organizations generating distinctive cultural patterns and institutions and usually providing protection, security, continuity, and a national identity for its members.”  In short, a society is unified by a government that is sovereign over a territory and has a population that views itself as members of one or more cultures.

A culture is a set of attributes that are expressed, maintained, and valued by groups of people that may belong to one or more societies.  The minimal set of such attributes are language, religion (or worldview), ehtnicity, traditions, values, mores.  The strength of a culture depends on how many such attributes are acknowledged, shared, and enforced.  Most of such attributes are not codified and pass from generation to generation through families and interaction in intimate mono-cultural communities.  Therefore, a culture is what its adherents say it is, and the survival of the cultural meme requires the maintenance of one or more critical masses of such subscribing populations.

I covered the basic arguments for the modern status of culture in ‘Liberty’s Twilight’ and ‘Multikulti and ‘people like me’’.  And since we are here talking about rights, another slippery concept, I point you to the piece on Rights and Privileges that was included in the university course on critical thinking that I taught to journalists and media producers.  With this background, let me dive in.

The short answer is that a culture, as a group of people, has no intrinsic rights.  Only the members of a culture – the people as individuals - have rights.  Therefore, if a culture can be maintained by individuals acting in concert while exercising their individual rights, the culture survives so long as its members wish.  Cultures die through dilution of its critical masses, dilution that is caused by people leaving and/or by extra-cultural people arriving to forcefully comingle.

What is usually omitted in such considerations is the right of people to gather exclusively, and to discriminate who belongs and who doesn’t – in sum, the right to exclude whom they wish by legal redress or simply through shunning.  And since these rights exist only to the extent that they are maintained by force, a supportive government is required.  But to repeat, governments do not directly guarantee cultures (since they are not codified), but only provide a society’s legitimate guns to guarantee individual liberties that may be used to maintain a culture.

So the bottom line is that a culture has no intrinsic ‘right’ to endure, let alone thrive, in its homeland or anyplace else.  A culture survives only to the extent that it is actively practiced and protected by individuals coming together in a manner which to them provides value and enhances their quality of life.

 

‘Minority Rules’ or Why Bloggers Blog

George Rebane

Rensselaer Polytechnic researchers have discovered a dynamic network model that explains how a minority opinion can become a majority opinion when certain tipping point parameters are exceeded.  In the internet age this process has also been labeled ‘going viral’, and many of us have seen and studied its technical properties.  The RP researchers have been able to identify the tipping point as being somewhere around 10% minority opinion holders when the network of communicants is sufficiently connected.  (more here)

With modern media the spread of ideas enjoys a very dense network of connections over which compelling opinions and notions travel and become influential.  This would also apply to the spread of memes.

I guess bloggers in some way sense this and keep up their incessant efforts to put out thoughts they hope will gain some traction out there.  Of course, many of these thoughts are also re-transmissions of things they heard elsewhere, modified somewhat, and then passed on.  Again we come back to the secret life of memes (see also the work of Richard Dawkins and Julian Jaynes).

In sum, the spread of memes is a very non-linear process – hence the notion of a tipping point – and goes a long way to explain why poorly polling politicians keep plugging along, and sometimes even catch a breeze from a seemingly unknown quarter that blows them into office.  Now the system sciences are starting to develop explicative models that may some day soon evolve into predictive models (heaven help us then).  I look forward to this work being connected to the research reported by Bryan Caplan in The Myth of the Rational Voter.

Discussing Norway and Breivik

George Rebane

“Norway's murders shouldn't be an excuse to shut down debate over multiculturalism and the failure of many Muslims to assimilate to Europe's cultural norms. British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Nicolas Sarkozy have broken taboos by speaking sensibly on the subject. Democracies need to address their anxieties openly, rather than push the political debate underground where the likes of an Anders Breivik can let them stew into a rationale for violence.”  26jul11 WSJ

The recent terror in Norway is an event that again has altered our times.  But it is not yet clear that its dissection in the aftermath will serve to illuminate these times.  This is made amply clear in the various media venues that serve commentary and discussion.  The event most certainly has highlighted the radically different views held by various ideologically defined cohorts, and in the US it is another timber thrown into the fire that continues to consume the bonds holding the country together.

This is no more visible than on these very pages as documented in the comment stream for ‘Norway Terror’.  For the more attentive reader, it is obvious that much of the generated heat comes from the discussants not taking the time (or being able?) to understand that they are semantically imprecise and all over the map when presenting their views.  Semantically orthogonal aspects of the case are co-joined willy nilly and the discussion wanders in random circles, resolving nothing, including where people stand on the related ideas and issues.

In the hope that more commenters here are people of good will, people who want to use this venue to clarify, dispute, or confront each other’s ideas instead of continuing to play ad hominem ‘gotcha’, I offer the following (no doubt incomplete) list of semantically orthogonal notions about the Norway tragedy, and invite others to add to it their own discoveries as they meditate on the greater dimensions of this tragedy.

Then in no particular order, some semantically orthogonal (or independent) areas that come under the larger umbrella of ideas and notions arising from Norway’s terror are –

1. The right of a culture to endure and thrive in its homeland,
2. The right of a culture to spread trans-nationally through (assimilating, insular) settlements,
3. The historical impact of multi-culturalism (cultural mixing) on individual cultures,
4. The status and objectives of the current multi-nationally based Islamic jihad,
5. The status and objectives of non-Islamic needs for energy from Islamic lands,
6. The social impact of EU immigration policy,
7. Major themes in today’s European acceptance/confrontation with Muslim immigrants,
8. Norway’s immigration policy,
9. The behavior of Muslims in Norway,
10. The formal political structure of Norway (major, minor political parties and recognized nationalistic and trans-nationalistic movements),
11.  Norway’s sub-rosa political structure (secret organizations, terror cells, etc),
12.  The recent sentiments of ethnic Norwegians toward immigration in general,
13.  The recent sentiments of ethnic Norwegians toward its Muslim population,
14.  Legitimate and illegitimate means of opposing cultural dilution,
15.  The ideas in Breivik’s manifesto/compendium,
16.  Assessment of Breivik’s stated objectives,
17.  Assessment of Breivik’s means (the terror killings),
18.  Assessment of Breivik’s sanity and/or mental state,
19.  Impact of extra-national political movements and policies on Norway,
20.  The political future of Europe,
21.  The ethnic future of Europe,
22.  The future of western culture in Europe,
23.  What the Breivik massacre reveals about American politics,
24.  New and beneficial policies for Norway,
25.  New and beneficial policies for America.

If a discussant is unwilling to recognize how these notions stand on their own, then it should be his job to establish, identify, and defend any co-joinings in his arguments.  If a discussant doesn’t understand any of this, then it is better for all if he continues to study the matter and remains a passive reader of the debate until the ‘Aha!’ occurs.

Then Why Not $30 Trillion??

George Rebane

Sen Reid and Speaker Boehner have come up with competing plans to up the US debt limit.  Boehner’s plan will get us by the ‘sky is falling’ default scare and give time for a serious debate on tax reform and meaningful spending cuts that should last for years.  Among other provisions, it calls for an intermediate rise of $1T in the debt limit and a 10-year span of $3T in spending cuts.  The plan also calls for a further debt limit rise next year pursuant to progress on tax reform and meaningful spending cuts in entitlements.

This has a chance of trying to bring the US in for a soft fiscal landing without opting for the inevitable monetary (hyperinflation) catastrophe.  However, it’s a poison pill for Obama’s re-election hopes since it will bring up all of the President’s fiscal mismanagement during a most inconvenient time.  Next year, he’ll have enough trouble two-stepping it through the economy while still trying to lay everything at Bush2’s feet – hell, it’s worked before.

Reid’s plan is a farce that advertises $2.7T in spending cuts over the next decade, but contains no real spending cuts at all.  He proposes to take almost all of it from the military with a sop of $30B (chump change) to be derived from some mysterious “reforms” of Fannie and Freddie.  The military cuts are both ill-advised and cynical, and remind us of Chamberlain waving his 1938 ‘Peace in Our Time’ agreement as he returned from a meeting with Herr Hitler – WW2 started less than a year later.

The Jobs Leak Continues

George Rebane

While we’re all tangled up in our fiscal underwear, few noticed that even GE (aka Government Electric) is not doing much to artificially keep jobs here in America.  They are expanding their X-ray business to China “to be closer to our customers.”  Since China’s healthcare industry will be booming in the coming years, that makes a lot of sense.  But then, I thought ours would also be booming as our population gets older.  Well, whatever.

The real reason, it turns out, is that GE plans to do its technology development and grow its future manufacturing capacity also in China.  Again, that makes sense since China has technical workers coming out of its ying-yang (that’s Chinese for an unmentionable orifice), and here we graduate people who in the large ‘don’t do numbers’.  Most of our college majors pump out people for jobs where you say ‘would you be having fries with that?’ a lot.

And, of course, China is now rapidly moving into manufacturing high-end products at an unbeatable cost, while here our National Labor Relations Board is trying to beat crap out of Boeing for expanding its new operations into South Carolina, a right-to-work state.  I bet Boeing is also dreaming of moving its aircraft manufacturing business to some other shore – care to guess where?

GE ropa-dopes the light thinkers with its promise not to decrease its existing 120 worker labor force in its existing X-ray manufacturing plant in Waukesha, Wisconsin, a forced union state  (more here).  That, dear reader, is known as a sop to Team Obama and the Democrats with whom GE has forged an incestuous relationship.

But the reality remains, our captains of industry are gaming the system to the max.  GE knows that if it doesn’t compete in the China market, there are a handful of other international companies that will expand into that market in a heartbeat.  And then the result is that GE will continue making overpriced and uncompetitive X-ray units that can only be sold in the US, and then only if the government sticks a gun to the buyer’s head.

So that’s the update from our job creation front as our governments at all levels busy themselves with writing more burdensome and confusing regulations, increasing fees and taxes, and generally creating investment risks out of thin air.

Norway Terror (updated)

George Rebane

So now Norway has Anders Behring Breivik, its own equivalent of America’s Timothy McVey.  We read that the 32 year old farmer has killed almost one hundred people, personally murdering eighty some by shooting each of them at close range.  He also posted a YouTube video (now removed) of himself declaring his terror rampage before first setting off a bomb in the center of Oslo, and then going out to a nearby island, disguised as a policeman, to shoot the youth gathered there.

We read that Breivik was a declared Christian “extreme right winger with anti-Muslim sentiments.”  He was disturbed by what he saw as the permissive multiculturalism that has given rise to the Islamic enclaves throughout Europe including his native Norway.  Apparently this attack was in planning for almost two years, and was to serve as a dramatic call for European “martyrs” to begin some sort of violent pushback of Islam and Marxism that he has described in a long “compendium/book” he titled 2083 – A European Declaration of Independence.  I have not read it, but it can be downloaded from google docs here.

What we do know is that he ordered six tons of fertilizer from which he presumably made at least one bomb, and that the island massacre lasted 90 minutes before the Norwegian SWAT team finally arrived after 40 minutes, and then took another 50 minutes to stop the killing.  Apparently there was not a single law-abiding gun on the island that could have saved lives during that interminably long killing spree.

It is hard for me to conclude that this was the act of a sane individual.  Perhaps he offers an explanation in his compendium as to how he thought that his terror would start some kind of spontaneous attack on people of non-European cultures.  But to a sane person, no matter his politics or sentiments about Islam and western culture, this act did nothing to achieve his declared end.  In fact, I think, like Timothy McVey, this was the most horrifically inappropriate and misguided use of violence that Breivik could have conceived – an assessment I cannot lay at the feet of Islamic terrorists who have so far used worldwide terror effectively to advance their ends.

Now we await for the investigation to reveal the complete and, perhaps, a different story about Breivik.  I am saddened that so many people had to die at the hand of a twisted individual, especially one who claims to be a defender of western culture.

Your thoughts?

[update]  One question that occurs during events like these is ‘to what extent is this a canary in the mine?’  It is usually at the edges that society first shows that something with it is awry.  The mentally or economically frail begin to visibly protest existing conditions, and then start to act like outlaws.  Wealthy and advanced societies usually react positively if not always in a timely manner to such signs.

If shopkeepers begin reporting that bread is being stolen from their shops, and this becomes more widespread, then an enlightened collective would be better served by finding the cause of the problem instead of just hiring more police.  If ill-schooled students graduate in greater numbers when more money is put into education, then an enlightened collective would conclude that there might be other factors at work than lack of funds.

But here we come into a conundrum – ascribing cause.  Upon reflection philosophers and scientists have come to understand that cause is ascriber-specific.  People with different belief systems, knowledge, intelligence, experience, and data can look at an event and ascribe markedly (wildly?) different precursors that were its actual cause.  To the extent that a culture and/or ideology are shared by a society, they will tend to interpret things in a more like manner and come to similar conclusions as to cause.  And the opposite is also true as we witness every day (and also on these pages).

So, in Norway was this madman a harbinger, a fraying edge that declares existence of a deeper problem in Norway’s European population?  What caused him to go on his murderous rampage, and what should the Norwegians do to minimize the likelihood of such future occurrences?

(In a future post I am planning to do a piece on causality that may help in the discussion of events like this and broader aspects of assessing public policy.  The effort always is to promote complete, clear, and concise communication on these pages.  Hard duty.)

Climbing Mount DebtandTaxes

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my bi-weekly KVMR commentary broadcast on 22 July 2011.]

Let’s talk a little bit about debt and taxes.  Listening to leaders from both parties, you get the opinion that if we don’t raise the debt limit – by August 2 or whenever – that the world’s economy is going to collapse.  More sober minds, honed by the logic practiced around a kitchen table, will tell you that this is not true.

Please consider – major lenders to the US government have been quietly reducing their loans to us, they’re scared that eventually we won’t be able to repay them.  And everyone in Washington knows that today we have more than enough federal revenues coming in to pay the interest on our existing debt.  We just have to tighten belts and prioritize our other domestic spending.

So how do our creditors and rating agencies look at this?  Today we are telling the world that we will default on our interest payments if we can’t borrow more money from our creditors, so that we can then give some of it back to them in interest payments.  And everyone knows that Washington has no plan to stop increasing our national debt - we just promise to borrow more and forever.

Now I don’t know about you, but if I were China I’d say this relationship has become insane, and is most certainly not sustainable.  The name Ponzi must be starting to echo in the halls of Beijing.  But the credit rating agencies – the gang that couldn’t figure out the mortgage market trainwreck back in 2007 – are again putting out more Wrong Way Corrigan pronouncements.  They tell us that if we do change our ways, and start spending within our means, and limit our debt to the current $14.3T, then they will consider the United States to be a bigger credit risk and downgrade our rating.  Go figger.

However, if we keep spending like drunkards on payday, and keep borrowing what we don’t have to spend, then they will maintain our pristine AAA credit rating, and things will somehow again be hunky dory.  Isn’t this exactly 180 degrees out of sync with reality?  America’s creditors seem to think so. But according to our politicians, we taxpayers are too dense to figure this out.

Speaking of paying taxes, our progressive friends are convinced that the country can do with much higher tax rates.  They point back to the Eisenhower 1950s when top marginal rates touched 94% which effectively had the government take almost all of what you earned after a certain amount.  Since the country was booming in the 50s, little minds inside the Beltway are saying, ‘Let’s do it again.’

Running nimble fingers over their calculators, they can see enough dollars flowing in to put a real dent into our projected deficits, without cutting too much into the spending that buys votes.  What these same politicians don’t know, or are not telling us, is that in the 1950s no one actually paid 94 cents of every dollar they earned after a certain amount.  Why?  Because at that time the threshold was so high that almost no one earned those dollars as straight income.  And those who could, had lots of opportunities to shelter their earnings so that it never reached the 94% trigger levels.

Today it’s completely different when we consider the tax rates we already pay, and the ones being proposed by big government mavens in Washington.  Dr Michael Boskin, professor of economics at Stanford, has run some numbers which tell us that in California we already pay a 44.1% marginal tax rate when we combine federal, state, and all the payroll deductions levied against our wages.  When the Bush tax cuts expire in 2013, that marginal rate will jump up to 58.4% for those earning $200K and couples earning $250K a year.

But we’re not done yet.  Using the President’s numbers, the Congressional Budget Office tells us that to cover the projected $841B deficit in 2016, will require all (yes, all) income taxes to increase by almost another third.  This will bring the “total combined marginal tax rate to 68.8%.”  In short, government will then take more than two of every three dollars that you earn above whatever limit they decide to impose.

According to the progressive mindset, such tax hikes aren’t supposed affect how hard we work, or how much we risk and earn.  To them, we are just little mindless squirrels on a treadmill, and we’ll run just as hard as ever, never mind how much we get to keep.  Now, is that the way it works in your world?

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on these and other themes in my Union columns, and on georgerebane.com where this transcript appears.  These opinions are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

Listen up you idiots, … (updated 23jul2011)

George Rebane

[For a translation of the following transcript that’s more suited for polite company, please see the article in the 20jul11 Union.]

…, er, I mean all you good citizens and taxpayers of Nevada County.  Since the case is now settled, I’m gonna explain to you how this lawsuit went down, and I’m not gonna say it again, so you better pay attention.  Like the Big Man said, he’s “really pleased that this is over with.”

First of all, we never did nothin’ wrong.  We said that at the start, and no one has proved otherwise.  So we’re saying it again.

Second, we told you at the beginning that we had different views than the plaintiff, that’s the other guy, about what happened, and guess what?  Now that it’s over, we still have different views.  How ‘bout that?

Third, all parties “agree that there has not been any finding of liability for or against any party.”  Mainly because we caved before letting the judge deliver his summary judgment which would have cost us a bundle because then our insurance company probably would have walked.  Pretty smart, eh?  And that “… against any party” bit?  We threw that in to make it look as if some of you would believe that AtPac was also guilty of something here.  Oh yeah, and we don’t consider the judge fining us $22K for scrubbing evidence off of our server as a ‘liability’, that was just what we call strategic chump change in the scheme of things – you know what I mean?

Fourth, like I told the Supes, “The parties acknowledge that the matter is being settled solely to avoid further litigation and other costs of going to trial.”  And well, maybe also those who might get to read the depositions if it all came out in court.  For you people unfamiliar with lawsuits and legal stuff, other ‘matters’ like this are usually settled on the basis of the weather on the trial date, or in what color cars the parties arrived at the court house - you know, things like that.

Now that it’s over, and no one’s guilty of nothin’, and we ducked the big enchilada, and the records are sealed up tighter than a …, never mind; I hope that it's all cleared up in everyone’s head, and that we won’t have to put up with any of this Freedom of Information crap when we tell you to go pound sand.  Capiche?

Dismissed!

[22jul2011 update]  It appears that The Union has now filed its FOIA for the information pertinent to the case and is off and running on demanding an explanation of who did what when (more here).  Note that county counsel is continuing the lamer-than-ever cover-up with the statement that they don't have the Greg Diaz deposition, it's down in the Sacramento offices of their law firm.  Well, how about someone getting their butt in the car, driving down there and getting it?

You'd think that at least a copy of such a seminal, important, and revealing peace of testimony would be ensconced and studied in the Rood Center.  Nah, that would only happen if they were planning on doing some remediation so that in the future more millions don't go pouring out the door.  The beat goes on.

[23jul2011 update]  Stan Meckler, president of the NC Tea Party Patriots (of which I am a member), writes a related article in today's Union.  And Barry Pruett on Inside Nevada County Politics adds more first person contacts with the Nevada County principals in this case.