Rebane's Ruminations

Voting for Sue McGuire and Doug LaMalfa

George Rebane

In next Tuesday’s primary I am voting for Sue McGuire for Nevada County’s District #1 supervisor, and State Senator Doug LaMalfa to become our new representative in Congress.

Sue McGuire has all of the qualifications to become our new supervisor.  I won’t belabor them; you can see them on her website.  She has also come to our home for an extended meeting with us and our neighbors, and we have talked with her numerous times at community meetings.  In this interval we have gotten to know her, and I endorse Sue because she will be a capable, professional, and prudent voice on the Board who is ideologically the closest to my own beliefs about governance.

But, given those necessary qualifications, perhaps the prime reason I am voting for Sue is that she will be a new face at the Rood Center, a person with no established ties or ‘accounts’ with county staff, the other electeds, and relationships with the various special interest government associations, leagues, commissions, committees, and NGOs that dot California’s public policy landscape.  Today more than ever, for me that has become the necessary add-on in choosing whom to support for public office.

Agenda21 on cat’s feet (updated 24may12)

George Rebane

I just returned from the Nevada County Board of Supervisors meeting at the Rood Center.  I went there to hear the report on establishing a 2005 county baseline for CO2 emissions presented by the Sierra Business Council with some mysterious connection to ICLEI.  (You can check the details on the county’s website.)  The report consisted of a bunch of pie charts showing metric tons of “CO2 equivalents” emitted by various county activities and sources.  The numbers came from plugging SBC collected county data into a computer model supplied by ICLEI.

The longer term purpose of this baseline data is to set CO2 targets, pass future regulations and ordinances, and establish monitoring and enforcement procedures to further constrain and dictate the behavior of county residents.

ICLEI stands for International Council for Environmental Initiatives.  It is the NGO charged with implementing UN’s Agenda 21 plan for constraining and controlling ALL human activity on earth as soon as possible.  ICLEI, headquartered in Germany, is the coordinating arm for the distributed infusion of ‘smart growth’, ‘sustainability’, ‘energy efficiency’, ‘climate change laws’, … at local levels throughout the world.  USA, signatory to Agenda 21, has more than 500 national chapters of which over 100 are in, where else, California.

The SBC presenters professed singular ignorance of any of this or even any depth of the work they had done.  To them ICLEI was the supplier of the computer model into which they stuck their local data, period.  Supervisor Ed Scofield called me to the mike to explain ICLEI, and then expressed his deep concerns about the encroachment of ICLEI’s infusion of Agenda 21.

Supervisor Nate Beason asked some excellent questions re the presented ‘metric tons’ and the source of the computer model used.  Supervisor Beason wanted the quoted numbers to be put into some context which would establish their significance.  The SBC people were not able to do that either.   The question still to be asked is ‘how was the computer model validated and by whom?’

Ruminations - 16may12

George Rebane

The bad news about Obamacare just keeps getting worse.  In addition to recent reports that colleges are dropping higher costing student health plans prescribed under the law’s provisions, we now discover that Obamacare puts a new excise tax on one of the remaining areas of job creating and innovation in which we still lead the world – medical device manufacturing.  It’s one of the few industries left that contributes to the positive side of our trade balance, and provides over 400,000 direct jobs and about two million indirect support jobs.  Here I’m talking about CT scanners, pacemakers, blood pressure devices, and even the new robots used in surgery.

In ‘Obamacare’s Killer Device Tax’ Dr Henry Miller writes that “the US leads the world in medical technology.  A punitive new excise levy jeopardizes jobs and innovation.”  Team Obama sees this industry as the next one it can attack in order to further disable American leadership in innovation and commerce.  Obamacare will impose a new add-on 2.3% excise tax on medical devices that kicks in next January.  This is a serious kick in the shorts because of the high regulatory cost of jumping through hoops, and the long accrual of sales revenues required before ROI becomes positive.  It isn’t that hard overseas.

And what happened to this year's five million new citizens that became of age and didn't bump the number in the workforce?  Lots of possible answers, "Or are more of the long-term unemployed becoming the never-again employed?"  The labor market participation has increased since the 1940s, then leveled and started going down around 2000, causing a lot of people to look for reasons.  My money is also on the govt worker retirees whose outlandish pensions came due, and made it easy to drop out early. Meanwhile on the campaign trail the Big Lie machine about how our economy is creating jobs under the Messiah is in full swing.  Daily the real news belies every bit of his empty braggadocio.

‘Testing is not Teaching’ is the growing cry of parents of minority kids across the country.  The teachers unions like NEA are joining in and asking that Congress roll back testing mandates that started under Bush2’s No Child Left Behind and were picked up by Obama’s Race to the Top.  The charges against testing range from being unfair to teachers, having arbitrary scoring levels, being poorly designed, to stifling the more creative aspects of education.  Teachers are accused of teaching to the tests, and they are not doing a good job at it.  Meanwhile other school districts are saying that their teachers have not changed their curricula, are not teaching to the tests, and that their kids are doing quite well on such tests.

I’m a proponent of standardized testing in core skill areas like reading, writing, and math.  Testing can also be useful in confirming what kids have learned in the hard sciences like physics and chemistry.  But things get squishier when you add in questions about sociology, literature, and even civics.  The opponents of testing don’t tell us about reliable alternatives for measuring how kids and teachers are doing in the learning and teaching of critical skills that underpin the ability to do well in all the other subjects, and in life.

For reasons that I don’t understand, the cost of testing has also gone up, even with the introduction of computers and other technology.  And that is part and parcel of the overall cost of education that is sky rocketing, again for reasons that both academics and economists are attempting to discover.  Over the years why does it cost more and more to turn out Susies and Johnnies who know less than ever?

And did you catch that some school children from LA are suing California for promoting a "statutory scheme" that keeps bad teachers in classrooms, especially classrooms in low-income schools.

Climbing Sugar Mountain.  Mark Zuckerberg’s baby is going to hit the merciless markets on Friday, and no one really knows what it’s worth.  Why?  Well, Facebook’s market cap will be based on “finding ways to make money that haven’t been demonstrated or articulated yet.”  No one is sure that ads on the social medium work, and dealing in the vast amounts of collected user data is an uncertain minefield.  And young Mr Zuckerberg has not exactly been sending strong signals about his concern for profits and acumen in being CEO of a public company, one that will be under intense scrutiny by everyone.  But what the hell - got a hunch, bet a bunch – after all,  people are saying that out the gate Facebook will be worth ten times as much as Google was at its IPO.

Dufus Government – why we need to starve it

Government at its best is a necessary evil, and at its worst, an intolerant one. – Thomas Paine

George Rebane

The contradictory, self-defeating, and citizen oppressing behavior by government at all levels just added two more battle ribbons of stupidity to their banners.

The first is the latest outrage by the feds who deem marijuana consumption illegal across the country in contravention to 17 states which have pronounced it legal.  California is one of the 17, and Nevada County is currently in a white heat debate over its recently passed ordinance prescribing the cultivation of marijuana.

The ordinance is quite draconian, with sufficient measures of all hues in it that 99.44% of the county’s growers can be busted at any time at the discretion of local authorities.  And, of course, they can be arrested and indicted by federal authorities regardless of what California and our county permits.  Our local supes assure us to not worry about the ordinance; that unless you’re really really bad, no one will enforce it.  No such guarantees can be given about the feds.

Our congressman Tom McClintock joined with two other House members to introduce a bill that would remove funding for federal marijuana raids.  The bill failed miserably (262-163) with most Dems in favor, and only one in eight Repubs willing to back states’ rights (H/T to reader, more here).  Go figger, but don’t take too long, the problem is not that hard.  As I have long noted, the two cohorts in our society that would have the most to lose if marijuana progressed toward legalization are the drug traffickers and the drug enforcement authorities.  The trade is a cash cow for both, and neither wants the cops and crooks game to go unfunded and, God forbid, stop.  (History buffs will recall that for the same reasons the repeal of prohibition was equally opposed by the police and organized crime.)

Here in California our Governor Moonbeam made the easily predicted announcement today that none of the state’s past tax/fee increases, regulatory additions, green industries, …, none have produced the projected revenues needed to balance California’s so-called budget.  In fact, revenues have plunged enough to increase the recently announced $9B deficit to its current level of $16B.  Enough people have bailed and continue to banzai out of here to make a bad situation worse.

But the pullet pucky politicians in Sacramento are not done.  They have put their cross hairs on those wealth producers still here, and have decided that another round of tax increases is required to finally fix things.  Not having the character or courage to pass such an increase themselves, they have again thrown the measure into the referendum mill, hoping that we would be dumb enough to pass the increase this November.  One of the big lies, reported here before, is that some of the money will go to maintaining classroom services for our kids’ education.  Actually, the new tax money will go to shore up the egregious under funding of teachers’ union pension funds.  The kids will see no benefit.

Anybody willing to do a little wager on the amount of revenue shortfall the new tax increase will create if it passes?

So, dear reader, here is more conclusive proof that the fix-all remedy for government is simply to starve the beast while revising its legal code, abolishing rogue agencies, rewriting its tax code in toto, and returning rights to the states as exquisitely prescribed by our Founders.

Education, teacher meritocracy, and our national future

George Rebane

RR has long promoted the idea that education in wealth producing/sustaining fields is the ONLY solution to America’s economic and social problems.  Former SecState and now distinguished senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, George Shultz co-authors ‘Education Is the Key to a Healthy Economy’ with Eric Hanushek in which they acknowledge our broken K-12 public school system, and make the argument that quality STEM (Science, technology, engineering, math) education correlates strongly with and is a causal factor promoting economic growth – see nearby chart.  Their conclusion is that “An improved education system would lead to a dramatically different future for the U.S., because educational outcomes strongly affect economic growth and the distribution of income. ... (And) if we fail to reform K-12 shools, we'll have slow growth and more inequality."

The authors point out research that shows how per capita GDP is affected by STEM proficiency, and that –

Current U.S. students—the future labor force—are no longer competitive with students across the developed world. In the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings for 2009, the U.S. was 31st in math—indistinguishable from Portugal or Italy. In "advanced" performance on math, 16 countries produced twice as many high achievers per capita than the U.S. did.

Continuing on this path, as is the current strategy promoted by the nation’s teachers unions, will guarantee to nail us to a slow growth future in which all the catastrophes from our indebtedness and unfunded liabilities will come home to roost in spades.  We will quickly become a second rate nation and all that entails in our ability to remain as the world’s most salutary and beneficent hegemon in history.

Ruminations - 1may12 (updated++)

George Rebane

It looks like getting your college education subsidized will now become a new ‘right’ across the land.  Neither party is willing to let student loan interest rates increase automatically as they were supposed to.  As a taxpayer, I want the government out of the student loan business (among many other businesses they are in), but as long as they want to play lenders (recall the last time they tried that in real estate) with my money, I want to be able to have a say what areas of study that I and fellow taxpayers will fund.  Most certainly I don’t want to be on the hook for defaulted loans by people whose majors only qualified them to gainfully ask ‘... and would you like fries with that?’ after graduation.

On the whole, our post-high school education system is a mess, which is just a continuation of the mess our high school system is in.  Both secondary and post-secondary school systems are scam operations on the national weal, each costing an arm and a leg, and delivering little brains.

But the President has now made student loans one of his campaign issues since he cannot run on his record.  Speaking of which, the latest poll has 49% of Americans wanting to overturn Obamacare, and 38% wanting to keep it.  The latter have no idea what’s in the legislation, and don’t really care because it just adds on to the other freebies that they already get from taxpayers.

The other big item brought up by the President is to garner the Hispanic vote by demagoguery on the illegal alien issue.  As I have repeatedly argued, the tragic mislabeling of the illegal entrants as illegal immigrants has totally muddied the debate and allowed the leftwing to bamboozle the lightweights with statements like Sen Dick Durbin's (D-IL) recent wail that the Republicans (especially in Arizona) are “considering people as criminals just because of their immigration status.”  Well hello Dick! We should consider them criminals because according to our laws, illegal entrants and aliens are.  And that sumbich regularly raises his hand to uphold the Constitution.

All of this doesn’t seem to be playing as well with the Hispanics because as of yesterday 45% of them support Arizona’s legislation to allow it to enforce federal law on illegal aliens.  43% don’t support it.  When all of our citizens are tallied, the support goes to 62%, and opposed are 27%.

Finally, on the anniversary of the Bin Laden hit we are still not allowed to see the photos that the Seal Team took of the raghead after they dispatched him.  Why?  Because it "may offend" some sensitive Muslims.  No one stops to consider that the willing exercise of power is the ONLY thing that the Islamists understand and respect.  And no one in the administration cares about the ongoing assaults and atrocious murders of Christians and Jews that continue wherever Muslims dominate.  No one checked to see how sensitive I was to the pictures of Danny Pearl’s decapitation, and I suspect that no one cares to this day.

But we are told to celebrate the “gutsy decision” the President made to take down the world’s foremost terrorist leader and accomplished enemy of the United States.  I am still puzzled about what part of that decision was gutsy, save the consideration of his political ass had the mission failed.  Last I saw, the man was still holding the title of our Commander-in-Chief.  Under the circumstances, what was he supposed to do?

However, the bottom line on this issue in this political season is President Obama's declaration that he won't politicize the Bin Laden killing, while at the same time claiming that Romney changed his mind and is now telling people that he too would have authorized the assassination raid.
 
Meanwhile, let's all enjoy the display of socialist solidarity that the Occupiers have promised us across the country on this annual celebration of international collectivism.

[update]  The news is in about California’s April revenues – state socialists surprised (again).  Turns out that corporate and personal income revenues have come in with a substantial shortfall from Moonbeam’s predictions.  The ‘rich’, on whom the state depends and promises to punish even more, are disappearing in greater numbers than anticipated ($2B fewer dollars last month from them alone).  Those who stay are reconfiguring their accounts to avoid confiscatory taxation.  The numbers on corporations are not in yet, but they have done all they can to either vamoose or move their earnings across the state line.

This sideshow is a continuing illustration of the progressive stasist mindset – raising taxes doesn’t matter, nobody will change their behavior.  RR readers have been advised of and discussing the realworld for the past five years, so no one here should be surprised.  Review assignment – Joel Kotkin’s ‘The Great California Exodus’.  But all said and done, don’t you wonder who are these faithful dumbasses whom the Sacramento Democrats continue to target with their BS?

[updated, one mo' time]  The Occupiers across the land, no matter how misguided in their protests, appear to protesting peacefully, and for that they are to be commended.  They have every right to get out there and proclaim their message.  It would be heartening to see them get a clue and put some people in front of the Capitol and the White House.  In the meantime, I'm showing my solidarity with the working man (with or w/o external plumbing) by doing some serious shopping this afternoon at local establishments so that they can continue providing jobs to these nebishes.

Sacramento vs California (updated 28apr12)

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary which was broadcast on 27 April 2012.  I have annotated it with notes and links as appropriate.]

One of the nation’s premier demographers Democrat Joel Kotkin was recently interviewed by the WSJ on his study of ‘The Great California Exodus’, that has been vehemently denied by the state’s progressive pundits and local leftists.  Kotkin reviewed the grand history of the golden state and its downward spiral that is now entering its third decade.  This demographer has been busy for a number of years studying and publishing on our economic and demographic decline.  (for more google ‘joel kotkin, california exodus’)

Among the more recent developments is that the great exodus which started with corporations – no one wants to expand in California – grew to include the well-to-do, and now includes middle class workers who are priced out its real estate markets, and taxed out of their income and ability to save.  Kotkin points out that California ranks at or near the bottom on every important comparison of the states ranging from ‘ease of doing business’ through cost of living to individual liberties.   Along with states like Illinois and New Jersey, we have become the poster child of how not to govern a state.

Where California used to invite the founding of innovative companies such as those which gave us Silicon Valley, today the main product of California, according to Kotkin, is red tape.  He goes on to explain that “part of California's dysfunction … stems from state and local government restrictions on development.”

That “local government” part hits home here in Nevada County.  Our county’s population has been stagnant for the last decade.  Both businesses and developers have been taking a pass on the county for some years now claiming that it is just too hard to get anything done in these foothills.  The leftwing activists, of course, celebrate this as an achievement in their eternal quest for a sustainable stasis.  And our local municipal and county governments have long had a bi-partisan effort to support these prohibitions and delays.  The cynical part of all this is the expressed denial by our electeds as they give lip service to promote yet another business development workshop or public meeting.

More Milestones on our Downward Spiral

George Rebane

This week has seen a lot of dilapidation in our ship of state.  For openers, Peggy Noonan takes an overarching survey of events that reflects on our national character.  From other perspectives we see what it is to be on a careening progressive luge as this administration more fully reveals itself, and what it can accomplish after getting the hang of it during the last three years.  A minimally hopeful sign is that more than a few Democrats are beginning to shake their heads at the excesses of socialist thought.

After all the information sharing between our intelligence services ordained by 9/11, we now hear that the FBI has pulled out of that little daisy chain, and has gone back to its insular ways of doing business.  It seems they weren’t getting that much from other agencies, and their stuff was leaking out.  A correlative to this is that the US seems to have shut down its pursuit of Russian spies on these shores, in spite of professional estimates (including from defectors) that Russia today has more spies in the US than it did during the Cold War, and has declared America to be its number one intelligence target.  The last prosecution of a Russian spy (Robert Hanssen) was in 2001, which case indicated that there was at least one more mole left in the fabric of the DOD.

In the meantime, the Transportation Safety Administration is starting to implement its VIPR program of checkpoints on US highways (google ‘VIPR checkpoints’ for a snootful).  The first ones were being tested in Florida to gauge public reaction to them.  It is, of course, all done for our own safety and to check the terrorist threat.  The counterpart of the policy is a further achievement of Agenda21 goals and objectives.  The checkpoints will spread from commercial transport vehicles to private automobiles in no time.  And, as everything else responding to the terrorist threat, these will remain a permanent fixture of our constantly expanding state that continues to grow 20% faster than our private sector economy.

A couple of years back we were on a bus from Alexandria to Cairo, and shook our heads sadly at what the Egyptians had to live with as we passed checkpoint after checkpoint manned by tough looking guys sporting AK-47s and more sinister stuff.  It can’t happen in America.

Back at the ranch, it seems that harbingers of the Great Divide are already in full swing.  Nationally known demographer and “Truman Democrat” Joel Kotkin writes and extensive peace on ‘The Great California Exodus’ and “what is driving the middle class out of the Golden State” (to loud denials from the loyal looney left).  It used to be only the mobile ‘rich’ who packed their bags and their companies to head to points east (I was going to say more about this, but Russ Steele beat me to it on NC2012).

Adding to the whole picture of our country’s ongoing and growing cross migrations is a report by Art Laffer and Stephen Moore about what impact the states’ income and corporate tax policies have had on states’ revenues and GDPs.  This is in addition to the Mercatus Center report we brought home from their Scottsdale conference last month.

But I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when reading that Elizabeth Warren, running for Congress in Massachusetts, has had at least one epiphany, maybe two.  The border line communist and "liberal heroine", recently on Team Obama, now acknowledges that 1) when you tax something more, you get less of it, and 2) real wealth and jobs are actually created by entrepreneurial private sector companies.  In fact she, along with a growing cohort of Democrats, are daily finding more and more things not to like about the impact this administration’s biggest lie, Obamacare, and faux pas on stopping the Keystone pipeline.  Even Barney Frank (gasp!) has climbed on this wagon.

So that’s a little update on how we are quietly becoming a progressive police state with daily more criminalized behaviors on the books, ever increasing taxes, frantic migrations of people seeking freedom, and a growing government that continues to add bureaus and (monitoring/enforcement) functions employing thousands to sop up the unemployable and increase its cohort of supporters on autopilot.  And then there are the rest of us.

On the sorry road to Stockton (updated 16apr12)

George Rebane

[This is the submitted form of my April column that appeared in the online (with figure omitted) and printed versions of the 14apr12 Union.]

By now most of us have heard of Stockton, the next California city teetering on the edge of bankruptcy as a result of a fiscal history that “has eerie similarities to a Ponzi scheme” according to its city manager Bob Deis.  The story is common to thousands of cities and counties across the land, and the core of each is years of lavish wage and pension benefits promised and delivered to the public sector employees in all the afflicted jurisdictions.

So now Stockton has already “suspended some payments to bondholders and is negotiating with creditors and unions”.  But Stockton, unlike many municipalities still drinking their koolaid, is open about its shortcomings.  A recent (1apr12) WSJ article reports that “Stockton admitted that its biggest problem has been a lack of transparency resulting in a host of ‘hidden costs’ in labor agreements for ‘obligations that are often difficult for citizens to identify or understand.’ ”

On the national scale the problem has been most recently researched and reported in the Cato Institute’s ‘State and Local Pension Plans’ by Jagadeesh Gokhale.  There we find that the financial health of most plans nosedived during the 2001 to 2009 interval.  What kept the apparent ponzi schemes going was that plan managers were allowed by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) to discount calculation of future plan liabilities at literally any interest rates which barely allowed them to keep a straight face.

California’s ponzi is still being foisted on the basis of the giant California Public Employees Retirement System projecting payouts and liabilities on the basis of their portfolio earning a now reduced (yes, indeed) rate of 7.5% annually, and that while Governor Moonbeam is going to raise taxes again to rebuild the state’s economy.  You can’t make this stuff up.

‘Greece Passes Key Debt Test’, NOT!

George Rebane

The world’s newspapers are heralding the massive haircut taken by Greek sovereign debt holders as some kind of triumphal finesse in international finance.  Specifically –

Just over 80% of Greece's private-sector creditors had agreed by a Thursday evening deadline to turn in their bonds for new ones with less than half the face value, touching off a massive debt swap that marks a seminal moment in Europe's long-frustrated efforts to rescue its most financially vulnerable nation.

The 9mar12 WSJ report goes on to celebrate this “seminal moment” of a long-awaited “rescue”.

But they got it all wrong.  The private sector investors accepting this level of loss are saying nothing other than ‘My choices are to lose the whole thing, or get out with 47 cents on the dollar.  I’ll take the 47 cents.’  Today Greece is having to pay over 600% for short term loans, which says that the probability of another default in 12 months is over 99%.

This has not been a solution to anything other than getting off of a sinking ship of state with some of your belongings.  All these ‘rescue’ pyrotechnics do nothing but bamboozle European taxpayers (e.g. Germans) to not riot in the streets as their governments piss away more money down the toilet to buy time and rescue the private lenders (big banks and heavy hitters).

Meanwhile back at the ranch boys and girls – this is California’s immediate future, and then comes the main event … .