Rebane's Ruminations

The Fiscal Cliff – just a thought (updated 31dec12)

George Rebane

…, and this is just for the record – no need to respond.  Congress at best will alleviate an immediate problem at hand, one that they themselves created.  Why did they create it?  Why, to finally address the runaway deficits and national debt that is taking us to the real fiscal cliff.  There is absolutely NO solution to that problem in what any of the parties are willing to do for this near-term charade.  The can is being kicked down the road big time as debt and deficits continue to increase for out years that disappear into the haze.

In any event, what will really happen is a big across the board tax increase – one that hits the middle class through the payroll tax increase (shhh! we’re not supposed mention that), and the other, the vaunted class warfare tax rate increase (that re-elected Obama) to up the taxes on everyone making more than $250K - or is it …?  Oh crap, who cares - among whom are legions of real job creators.  Whatever.

The real fiscal cliff?  That’s when the dollar collapses, the US effectively defaults on its debt and entitlement obligations (paying off in Monopoly money), and the world shifts to a hodgepodge of alternative reserve currencies for international commerce.  Our military will be reduced to coastal defense, and the biggest gun carriers in the land will be the FEMA Corps and Homeland Security focused on keeping Americans from getting at the throats of their government scumbags.

[31dec12 update]  This thoughtful Dilbert cartoon came from a reader.  It has appeared here before, but it is still very appropriate as we celebrate the new year - Happy 2013 everbody!

Who should (not) vote? (updated 29dec12)

George Rebane

The comment stream under ‘How to Protect School Children in Schools’  is another long one which inevitably becomes a bit hairy by developing threads that start covering the waterfront of issues of interest in these times.  Voter qualification was a thread that, to the best of my knowledge, appeared through some process of immaculate conception.  While entirely appropriate to the season, that thread diverts quite a bit from the posted topic and deserves its own venue for discussion.  This is it.

My long held position has been that more than being able to fog a mirror should be required of a US citizen before he is allowed to vote; even more than gaining a majority of 18 years, or not having been convicted of a felony, or not being institutionalized as a mental incompetent.  In short, there should be some intellectual and/or cognitive skills that the citizen should demonstrate that may even alleviate the majority and/or mental incompetency requirements.  But what would these skills be and how would they be measured and certified?

Our Founders recognized similar requirements and left it to the states to set the specifics.  Many required the demonstration of substance through ownership of land, or commercial interest, or wealth.  Various levels of these were judged to be a sufficient proxy for some minimum level of intellectual and cognitive skills.  Later, and mostly under Jim Crow laws, specific tests were imposed that required literacy (gasp!) and a basic knowledge of US civics.  These were struck down under various civil rights rulings.

So now we have a nation of voters who are 40% functionally illiterate, almost totally innumerate and innocent of science, and possess no essential knowledge base of how their governments at any level are constituted and work.  These people are supported by certain of our political minions as long as they can be reliably convinced to vote for bigger government, concentration of federal power, and more transfer payments paid for by higher taxes from the producing class.  And their proportion, as demonstrated by the last election, is such that we are now way past the tipping point at which democracy begins to devour itself.

So, before I taint the discussion with my own prejudices on voter qualifications, can you dear readers present any reasonable basis for change, if any, and if so, what kind?

[29dec12 update]  This post’s comment stream is now mature enough to detect some trends in how the title question is being answered.  First, what some of the progressive readers have confused are the orthogonal notions of 1) what improvements could/should be made to the voting franchise that is granted to some citizens, and 2) what is the likelihood that any given set of changes to voter qualifications would actually be adopted.

Christmas 2012

George Rebane

[This message was first posted on Christmas Eve 2009.]

The two main events in the Christian calendar are celebrations of the Promise and the Fulfillment.  Christmas calls on us to reflect on the Promise delivered - the arrival of Emmanuel, God with us, that made real what had long been promised.  By His appearance among us, the Promise of the good news and a new covenant of salvation between Man and God became an historical event.  He had come.

As Christians, we take great joy in the remembrance of that little noticed event two thousand years ago, an event that would alter the course of Man and his empires.  Today, in our own country and around the world, Christians again stand battered and confused by forces and events we scarcely understand.  But Christmas reminds us once more of the real hope for a better world in which we, in His image, will all have the freedom to grow and give according to the talents and opportunities afforded us.

Jo Ann and I wish all of you a joyous Christmas, and a new year where ‘Better!’ will properly respond to every ‘How are you?’ coming your way.

How to Protect School Children in Schools (updated 14jan13)

George Rebane

The 14dec12 Newtown shootings have raised two distinct issues in the public mind – 1) how to protect kids in school against rogue shooters, and 2) how to quickly politicize public passions and focus them on the progressives' long term program to disarm America.  My 17dec12 post ‘Fire! Ready, Aim – Panic-driven Public Policy’ invited discussion of WHEN and HOW we should proceed to find solutions to protecting kids in school, and admonished the rush to agenda driven ‘solutions’ before we knew the results of the massive investigation now underway in Newtown.

Few commenters cared to wait, and all wanted a rush to judgment which it appeared that each was also enthusiastic to lead.  The predictable divisions emerged instantly and almost all the ‘solutions’ offered contained no substantive reasoning to buttress them.  It was again sloganeering time, and all the old ones were hauled out, dusted off, and shouted across the ideological barricades.

No one even offered an objective (or utility function) that would at least frame a reasonable discussion.  To the simpletons it was simple, don’t we want to save school kids’ lives?  What in hell is complicated about that?!  And since guns were used for the killings, make it impossible for everyone including killers to get guns.  And what in hell is complicated about that?!

More reasoned voices counseled us to make haste slowly , and at least wait until we find out what led to the Newtown massacre.  (Taleb’s ‘procrastination promotes antifragility’ which I’ll cover soon, cf Antifragile - Things that gain from disorder)  But louder voices – led by our President and New York’s Bloomberg – advised proceeding in the heat of public passions lest they cool and let another crisis go to waste.

Enter the NRA, after letting some of the dust settle, to propose the installment of armed security personnel at all schools.  My own contribution was to achieve that security through arming of selected existing school staff, and augment through use of volunteer CCW permit holders from the community.  Such solutions brought out nationwide howls from the country’s leftwing that were appropriately amplified by the lamestream.

In spite of today’s ‘Fire!, Ready, Aim’ approach, we hear of more concerned heads taking appropriate actions to provide for the health and safety of their community’s school children.  Marlboro Township in New Jersey has adopted the NRA approach and will station armed security in their schools.   Also it turns out that other school districts in saner states already have armed school staff (teachers and administrators) on duty in their schools.  Here’s an AP report on a Texas town that is concerned beyond national demagoguery about their kids’ safety.  Things could be looking up, if we let them.

So, the purpose of this post is to dedicate a forum in its comment stream for discussing solutions to halt/reduce the incidence of school shootings, or more comprehensively, to school killings.  And for those discussants whose intellect and temperament allows, I offer a simple objective or utility function – minimize the expected rate of K-12 kids being killed while attending school.  Considering the last twelve years, that death rate is somewhere around 130/12 or 10.8 kids per year (data here).

A taxonomy of solution categories may be structured as follows –

1.    Increase National Gun Control/Confiscation
2.    Provide additional armed security at/on school facilities
2.1.    NRA approach – hired armed guards in schools
2.2.    Israeli approach – armed school staffers
2.3.    Rebane approach – volunteer CCW permit holders and Israeli approach
3.    Revise mental disorder laws to allow early interdiction of potential rogue shooters
4.    Various combinations of above categories
5.    Don’t address the problem and just vilify other solutions and the people who present or support them.  (This is really not a ‘solution category’ but an inevitable ‘response category’.)

[29dec12 update]  Physician and lawyer Dr Robert Bernat writes in today's WSJ a sober piece titled 'A Reluctant Vote in Favor of Armed School Guards'  wherein he observes that "Only one of the proposed responses to the Sandy Hook attack promises to have an immediate, positive effect."  Worth a read, especially by our liberal readers.

[14jan13 update]  As the White House now becomes the architect of the insanely ineffective gun control proposals being aired by the Left, here's some sanity from, of all places, Cal Fire News entitled 'How many kids have been killed by school fire?'

2013, the year of the Progressive Pandemic (updated 23dec12)

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 21 December 2012.]

You’ve all heard enough about the Newtown killings, and, no doubt, you will hear a lot more.  I decided to give you a break on the topic, and take one myself since the debate about the response to that tragedy has been hot and heavy on the web and on my blog.  In any case, today’s diatribe has obvious connections, should anyone want to tie things together.

I want to explore the notion that 2013 will be the year of the progressive pandemic.  In various forms this topic is being explored around the world after Americans gave a second term to their openly socialist president, and the country seems hell bent on a course of fiscal disaster that will remove the United States as a world hegemon.

In ‘2013: The Year America Dies?’ British journalist Paul Joseph Watson asks, “Will 2013 be remembered by future historians as the year that the United States of America, to all intents and purposes, died as a Republic and was finally seized by authoritarian globalists who have already openly usurped governments all across Europe?”

There are a lot of indicators baked into that question which answer it in the affirmative.   I’ll go through a few of them so you can form your own opinion as to how much they support Watson’s and my outlook.  It is easy to see that Europe is already in the bag for globalism, with leaders of major banks and investment houses in the EU countries all moving governments and economies in a direction to make the world safe for international finance.

Only terrorists resist fiat money

George Rebane

Some naifs will see the title here as a bit of hyperbole.  Don’t believe it for a moment, and for verification just ask Mr Bernard von Nothaus, American citizen.  He had the temerity to mint silver coins of his own design (pictured here) and sell them to willing buyers.  The buyers subsequently started reselling them on eBay.  This was done in the open, with not a hint of conspiracy.  These silver coins could be bought along with all kinds of silver, gold, and platinum coins that are on the open market at precious metals dealers.

Enter the Secret Service.  For the stated reason that Mr Nothaus was practicing “domestic terrorism”, he was arrested and convicted in federal court, and now awaits sentencing.  The Secret Service banned sale of these coins (more here).  The New York Times recently published a fairly balanced account of Mr Nothaus’ saga with the feds.

What the feds are really terrified of is losing control of the money supply for only one purpose, their ability to tax assets through inflation (see here for how that occurs) since there is no hope of paying our federal debt and unfunded obligations.  They can only be disposed of through milking the middle class and retirees out of their savings, and then paying off the government's obligations in nominally denominated and totally devalued faith-based money.  Anyone making available real money in quantities that can handle commerce is an enemy of the state that has firm plans to bilk its citizens.

It is not farfetched to see a day in the not too distant future when the federal government will reprieve its Depression era diktat and announce that we have only, say, 72 hours to turn in all of our precious metals (including numismatics).  Thereafter, people found in possession of precious metal bullion or coinage will be guilty of a felony, and those attempting to use the same for commercial purposes will be accused of domestic terrorism and suffer draconian punishment (more here).  Again, only naifs will think this to be hyperbole for the simple reason that they don’t know our ruling elites have no other alternative to retain control.

Mr Nothaus is only the first canary in the mine.  Now be a good citizen and go back to sleep.

Fire!, Ready, Aim – Panic-driven Public Policy (updated 21dec12)

"Passion governs.  And she never governs wisely."  Benjamin Franklin

George Rebane

The 14dec12 Newtown elementary school massacre again brings out all of our weaknesses as an ignorant and free people.  And the pandering politicians and public media are already at the trough, feeding on and encouraging every imaginable emotion that short circuits reason.  I want to take a look at the next collective calamity we are adding to the current pile within the Beltway.

The national debate on the massacre and reawakening of more gun controls is being repeated in an extended comment stream below ‘Ruminations – 14dec12 (updated)’.  Predictably, the arguments highlight the main polarities that today define and divide us.  The discussion herein will be limited to the reasoning processes that are fueling the forecasts of new public policies promised for the new year.

In the above referenced post a liberal commenter declared that the Newtown evil arose out of an inbred quality of American culture displayed most gruesomely in the 19th century massacres of American Indians during the nation’s westward movement.  His reasoning strongly concluded that Newtown’s mass deaths were of a piece with those inflicted on the Indians, and therefore give rise to modern day mass deaths in schools, theaters, malls, and other places where people are tightly packed.  His summa is that “a death is a death”, therefore they should all be considered of a feather.  Several other liberal commentators were quick to join their support to this deductive delusion.

Ruminations - 14dec12 (updated)

George Rebane

As it gathers steam, the national travesty that is Obamacare is now taking big bites out of our nation’s commonweal, and the real tragedy is yet to come.  Since arriving in the dark of night three years ago, it is now morphing into the gigantic puzzle palace that all government programs eventually become.  Obamacare’s puzzle palace is the Health and Human Services Department that now displays a “special combination of rigidity and ineptitude” beyond what was predicted for a program that is supposed to launch and be running by October 2013.

States are shying away from the law’s so-called “clearinghouses” which promise new orders of red tape and government inefficiency.  HHS, that so far has issued more than 13,000 pages of useless regulations, is refusing to answer states’ questions on how they are supposed to manage their ends of Obamacare.  The 14dec12 WSJ reports – 

…  for the better part of a year states and groups like the bipartisan National Governors Association and the National Association of Medicaid Directors have been begging HHS merely for information about how they're required to make ObamaCare work in practice. There was radio silence from Washington, with time running out. Louisiana and other states even took to filing Freedom of Information Act requests, which are still pending.

It is clear that the HHS does not know what it is doing, and is desperately trying to make something up by next October that doesn’t embarrass this administration too much, while forgetting that this administration does not embarrass at all as it staggers toward socialism.

In a word, HHS is treating the states not as the partners it needs to give ObamaCare any chance of success, but as serfs.

Meanwhile, companies are responding by restructuring their workforces, laying people off and making some into part-time employees – anything to escape the latest titan of bureaucratic burdens on our nation’s economy.   And the rest of us pikers are just getting the dribs and drabs of Obamacare’s latest bad news as prescribed by the Pelosi Principle.  It is clear to me that this mess will be way bigger than any of us predicted when that lump of coal arrived in our stocking on Christmas eve three years ago.

H.L Mencken in the 1930s kept a keen and gimlet eye on the mass of bureaucracies launched by FDR’s New Deal, and wondered about the mentality that was behind the onslaught that pushed the nation deeper and deeper into depression until the administration finally threw up its hands and admitted defeat in 1939.  Of this Mencken observed that –

Here is the perfect pattern of a professional world-saver. His whole life has been devoted to the art and science of spending other people's money. He has saved millions of the down-trodden from starvation, pestilence, cannibalism, and worse—always at someone else's expense, and usually at the taxpayer's. . . .
 
Of such sort are the young wizards who now sweat to save the plain people from the degradations of capitalism, which is to say, from the degradations of working hard, saving their money, and paying their way. This is what the New Deal and its Planned Economy come to in practise—a series of furious and irrational raids upon the taxpayer, planned casually by professional do-gooders lolling in smoking cars, and executed by professional politicians bent only upon building up an irresistible machine.

[update]  Newtown, Connecticut elementary school massacre.  This is the latest in a string of such mass shootings that reflect a sign of our times.  In the previous post 'War on Words' where discussion of this tragedy was starting, I posted a comment that in part reads - "... I see much merit in the proposal to permit legal guns in schools so that such mad shooters don't have a safe environment in which to go on a serial killing spree. It is today's world, after all.

Rumination - how did we become a world where such mass killings are becoming so commonplace? And the simple answer that guns are easy to get today won't wash - today it is harder to get hands on a gun than at any time in our history.   50 years ago, anyone could have an M-1 semi-automatic carbine or other equivalent weapon(s), and commit similar atrocities in crowded places like malls, theaters, and schools.  But to us then it was unthinkable, today it no longer is. What happened?"

War of Words

Michael McDaniel

It is not a novel concept for opposing political groups to focus on vocabulary superiority.  A feeble minded, me-focused electorate requires the use of buzzwords and sound bites to be manipulated. To the originator of the accepted propaganda-laden words go the spoils.  “Illegal aliens” vs. “undocumented immigrants.” From mislabeled legislation to the accepted use of the term “inflation.”
 
Have you ever noticed that the titles given to legislation coming out of Washington D.C. is often arrogantly misrepresentative of the underlying law’s substance?  The US Patriot Act (which is used to spy on Americans) to the Health Care Affordability Act (which has already accelerated health insurance premium costs and is estimated to cost over $1Trillion over the next decade). And the list goes on. 
 
What percentage of the population is aware that the equation used to report “inflation” (which drives monetary and fiscal policy) has been changed 9 times in the last decade?  And yet, US dollar debauching continues as the electorate accepts the reported inflation numbers (despite living with soaring cost of gas, food, healthcare, rent, etc).  The equivalent of having someone piss on your leg while they tell you it’s raining. But, the collective simply nods and accepts the rearranged inflation report as if it came from a deity.
 
Emotional, inadequately descriptive labels are pinned on ‘news’ items for manipulative reasons.  Today we need look no further than the emotionally charged “fiscal cliff” label attached to a tax increase and spending cut deadline.  Though in reality the day after the deadline will likely not be any different than the day before. 
 
I combat such nonsense by aggressively filtering my media intake.  I turned in television years ago and I read statements/laws/press releases directly from the source. 
 
Choose your words wisely.

[Mr McDaniel is a professional investment advisor who lives in Nevada County.]

Revealing Obama – the beat goes on (updated 14dec12)

"The spending will continue until the deficits improve." - Michael McDaniel

George Rebane

Conservative commentators are beginning to realize and report their discoveries that Obama is actually trying to take America into a level of socialism that would make the Europeans blush.  Rush Limbaugh is the most recent to experience this epiphany.  For RR readers, none of this should be news.

The fiscal cliff negotiations are providing the latest revelations of the messiah’s master plan.  His message to Michigan’s unions Monday was vintage socialist prevarication.  The state’s unions have held its workers back for decades, and caused an exodus of employers and the more talented employees to greener pastures in other states.  And Michigan still has an employment rate that is about 30% higher than the national average.

But there was Obama the Pandering Pangloss, attributing none of the state’s misery to forced union membership and encouraging them to oppose the state’s new right-to-work legislation from making Michigan the 24th state so blessed (more here and here).  Obama counseled – “what we shouldn't be doing is trying to take away your rights to bargain for better wages and working conditions.”  The new Michigan law – along with the 23 other such laws already on the books across the land - does none of that, but that’s not what the sheeple should believe as the unions continue to wage their thuggery in Lansing.

Raising the Bar for Teachers – Really? (updated 11dec12)

A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.  Thomas Jefferson

George Rebane

As long argued here, education is one of the four necessary elements of a solution to our ongoing national catastrophe of debt and dumbth.  The other three being a new tax code, massive regulatory rollback, and significant entitlements reductions.  Here we’ll focus on education and the new proposal put forth by Ms Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the nation’s two large teachers’ unions (AFT press release).

For background, Weingarten is an experienced union lawyer, leftwing political activist, self-declared lesbian and “deeply religious Jew”, and has been tagged as a “kingmaker” in New York politics.  Ms Weingarten proposes that K-12 teachers pass a ‘teachers’ bar exam’ before being allowed to teach in the nation’s classrooms.  In recent days the AFT initiative has been covered by leading newspapers like the Washington Post and WSJ for which she wrote an article on the proposal.

Ruminations - 9dec12

George Rebane

Just a couple of quick notes on some current and very important topics – the ongoing disaster of federal meddling in the markets, and how our systemic unemployment growth continues to be the biggest secret our ‘establishment’ (both parties) does not want to you to think about.

Remember Fisker, the battery-powered sportscar that was supposed to leap tall buildings in a single bound.  Well, that is the latest of the California-based, government propped and promoted green manufacturing enterprises to go into its death spiral.  Oh, make no mistake that the entire thing can be resurrected as a zombie company with some billions pumped into it, but right now it’s looking for a “partner” while wandering around with a ‘Buy Me, please’ sign pinned to its backside.

What should make it doubly embarrassing, but doesn’t – progressives are never embarrassed when their central planning doesn’t pan out and costs the wealth generators more money – is that the $110K Fisker Karma didn’t even pass the Consumer Reports test procedures to be rated, and the supplier of its battery pack, government subsidized A123 Systems, couldn’t come up with its mandated revolutionary batteries, and is now itself “in the midst of a bankruptcy auction.” (more here)

But none of this makes no never-mind to those Beltway Buffoons who know better what we should buy and how we should live.  This little item adds to the recorded torrent of such ongoing failures of approaching Soviet-era central planning.

America’s systemic unemployment growth continues unchecked and unreported.  What is reported is that the economy continues to grow in its anemic way with another 146K jobs added in November (with downward revisions of 49K jobs for previous months).  While outlets like the WSJ and zerohedge.com go through some of the numbers, even they don’t connect the important dots.

Last month's job numbers allow Team Obama to continue its national recovery bamboozle by citing that the official unemployment rate also dropped from 7.9% to 7.7%.  This happened, not because of the dodgy new jobs number, but because another 350K+ workers just quit looking for work, raising the number of nonworkers in our workforce to 89.2M from 86.8M a year ago.  Throw a brain cell on this, the fraction of people working in our available workforce has now fallen to 63.6%, down from 65.7% when the recession was supposed to have ended in June 2009.

What these percentages hide is the growth of the actual number unemployed.  Remember that the worker demographic continued to grow at somewhere between 1.1% and 1.5% annually during that same interval while the participation rate dropped.   People not arithmetically challenged know that this spikes the growth of non-workers who demand an ever higher redistribution of wealth.  The 8dec12 WSJ reports “Welfare payments that redistribute income from workers to mostly nonworkers now exceed $1T a year.”

To tie in technology driven productivity growth, according to the Fed we are today producing a 48% higher real GDP ($13.8T) than we did in 1996 ($9.6T) with the same number of people employed (approximately 95M).  Readers who do numbers can also take a look at some more strategic remarks I have made on this irreversible trend (here and here and here).

So what's the deal with totally misleading headlines like ‘Labor Market Plods Forward’ when it is actually falling further and further behind the amount of jobs needed to keep the country afloat?  The long-term picture has no chance of getting better because none of the buffoons acknowledge the problem, let alone have a clue about a solution.  ‘Full employment’ as we knew it is already a fading memory.

The 360 degree Asia Pivot

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 7 December 2012.]

Something world-shaking happened in Phnom Penh a couple of weeks ago, and Americans didn’t have a clue because our media either did not understand the event, or were still in their ‘protect Obama’ mode of operation.  But first let’s go back and get some background.

Some may recall that the most important geo-strategic policy of Obama’s second term was supposed to be the ‘Asia Pivot’ – this is where we refocus our foreign policy and international trade from Europe and the middle east to the Pacific rim countries that comprise half of the world’s population.  This is the part of the world that has avoided the recession debacle of the developed west now packed with countries teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.   And this is the part of the world where America’s biggest creditor and major trading partner lives.

These countries want to super-charge their already high economic growth rates by forming what would be the world’s biggest trading alliance.  That sounded good to us, and Team Obama put together something called the Trans-Pacific Partnership or TPP which would structure that alliance and establish the US in its traditional position of leadership in such associations.

To explain what was at stake, influential leftwing blogs like salon.com effused – “This agreement is a core part of the ‘Asia pivot’ that has occupied the activities of think tanks and policymakers in Washington but remained hidden by the tinsel and confetti of the election. But more than any other policy, the trends the TPP represents could restructure American foreign relations, and potentially the economy itself.”

So President Obama, fresh from winning a second term, climbed on AF-1 and flew to Phnom Penh, site of the 16 nation trade summit that included China, Japan, India, and Australia.  He was going to present his Trans-Pacific Partnership to the other attending world leaders, take his well-deserved bows, and return home with the major component of our Asia Pivot in the bag.

Administrivia – taking leave of The Union

George Rebane

All good things must come to an end, and the addition of some new responsibilities required me to drop something.  On 4 December 2012 I sent the following email – titled ‘Rebane’s column, -86-‘  -  to The Union’s publisher and managing editor.  I appreciated their cordial replies, and now look forward to being an Other Voice sans deadlines.

Dear People – Due to other mounting commitments, my run as a regular columnist for The Union must now end.  On reflection, I should have withdrawn immediately after the management changeover earlier this year so that you could better remake the paper in its new image, and not have to deal with clinging barnacles from the past.  From time to time I will continue to submit Other Voices articles which you may publish at your pleasure.  Thank you for having allowed me to share my views with your readership.

Ruminations - 6dec12

George Rebane

Remember the ladies from Detroit who loved President Obama’s “stash” but had no idea where it came from.  Well, it’s almost four years later, and one of them seems now to be on the Detroit City Council.  As readers know, Detroit is on its collective ass and getting ready for a little bit of Chapter 9 bankruptcy filing, and the lady is maximally irritated.  It seems that they have sent their paid lobbyists to Washington to tell Obama that ‘we voted for you, and now we want to be paid.’  What she’s actually asking for is some “bacon” from the stash that the city now richly deserves.  Obama seems to be filching on his promise.

And then there’s Great Britain equally sliding into fiscal oblivion on its derriere (can’t use ass twice in the same post).  Prime Minister Cameron is rallying the Brits to demand that companies operating on the island pay more taxes than they need to on (wait for it) “moral grounds”.  Sticking a mike into the face of a typical citizen, and you hear that corporations like Starbucks and Amazon are “immorally minimizing their taxes” by following the applicable EU tax laws.  Sadly, such is the damage that socialism does to an otherwise healthy brain.

Coming back to our side for a peek at the growing imperial presidency, we see a President, with bulging veins in his temple, tell the country that “I will not play that game (of joining debt limit and budget negotiations) any more.”   No one has yet been smart enough to tell him that 1) the Constitution gives him no power to reject political deals like that, and 2) it is most proper to join debt limits and budget negotiations since they both deal with and are intimately related to our run away deficits and the real fiscal cliff, which is the soaring national debt whose service costs will swamp future federal budgets.   Is he acting dumb on purpose or just letting the rest of us know that his voters are too dumb to understand this demagoguery?   (No need to answer this.)

Beyond the Tipping Point – Obama’s Third Term? (updated 4dec12)

George Rebane

Two intellectuals and students of the human condition – Harvard’s Harvey Mansfield and Yale’s Charles Hill – lend their considerable weight to the notion that we are beyond the tipping point to the promised “fundamental transformation” of America.  By all accounts we have now failed the Grand Experiment envisioned by the Founders to answer the question of the ages – Can man govern himself?  While the answer to that question is never final because the experiment is ever ongoing, they did provide us a magnificent tool to keep bringing back a ‘YES’ answer.  It’s called the Constitution.  Professor Mansfield tells us (‘The Crisis of American Self-Government’) that “the founders wanted people to live under the Constitution.  But the progressives want the Constitution to live under the American people.”

Along this line Professor Hill talks about the American decline (‘World Order in the Age of Obama’) and says –

And there now grows a deepening appetite for gain. America, perceived as eager to shed the burdens of world order in order to be “fundamentally transformed” through European-style social commitments, talks of engagement even when Iran’s “diplomacy” is a form of protracted warfare. The enemies of world order translate the American election results into the lexicon of abdication, telling themselves that their time has come: there is a world to be gained.  Only America’s return to world leadership can halt this deterioration. “Sequestration” will relegate the U.S. to a second rate power and must be reversed to enable American strength and diplomacy to be employed in tandem.

RR readers know that one of the more successful Rebane Rules, long argued here, is ‘The most reliable predictor of progressives’ policies is the their common aim of weakening America’s influence on the world stage by removing all vestiges of the country’s exceptionalism.’  The reliability of this rule is doubled when used to predict which turns Team Obama will take in navigating the ship of state (see also 'Obamunism' in Glossary).

The uses of America’s energy abundance.  In the same vein, there is a growing corpus of belief that America’s newly found gas and shale oil energy reserves will not be used to launch a new era of growth and prosperity for the country.  Instead the wealth from those resources will be commandeered by the federal government under new powers that it will discover and relegate to itself.  The entire scenario starts with President Obama having emerged from a second term victory to steer the country into a (hard to imagine) deeper fiscal thicket, whether by a rapid tumble over the approaching fiscal cliff, an extended version thereof, or a more torturous way.