Why Are We Not Outraged by This?

That's the last question Barkha Herman asks at ricochet.com, but she has many more leading up to it:

I own my own business, travel and entertain a lot, have many hobbies that I don't always get enough time for, and am considering writing a memoir. I donate money and time to causes I believe in. Birth control has never occupied more than one percent of my time ever in my life. I suspect the actual lifetime number is much lower than that.

So what is up with the entire birth control debate?  Am I just a walking vagina? Is this insulting just to me or others?

Read her full post.

"Trading Caps and Gowns for Mops"

Quentin Fottrell reports on two surveys of 18- to 29-year-old working college grads. An online survey of 500,000 young workers by Payscale.com found that "while 63% of 'Generation Y' workers have a bachelor's degree, the majority of the jobs taken by graduates don't require one." Another survey by Rutgers University reported that "half of graduates in the past 5 years say their jobs didn't require a four-year degree and only 20% said their first job was on their career path."

Worse, employers are hiring older workers over younger ones:

The jobs that once went to recent college graduates are now more often going to older Americans. Over the past year, workers over 55 accounted for 58% of employment growth, says Dean Baker, a co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C. Why? Employers think older workers are a safer bet and more likely to stay, he says. Unemployment hovered at 6.2% in July for workers over 55, according to the Labor Department, but was more than double that rate — 12.7% — for those ages 18 to 29. As a result, college graduates are finding themselves locked into lower-paid jobs.

Don't Blame Tax Cuts for Huge Deficits

A recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report puts to rest any misperception that tax cuts are the leading driver of our currently enormous budget deficits. Key findings:

• had there only been the tax cuts and no further spending measures, we would have enjoyed large and growing surpluses instead; and
• the main cause of today's huge deficits is increased mandatory spending in the form of Medicare prescription drug benefits, the TARP bailout and the 2009 stimulus. 

For more, see National Center for Policy Analysis synopsis of the CBO findings, or full paper by the Economic Policies for the 21st Century: How Did Federal Surpluses Become Huge Deficits? (Hint: It Wasn't Because of Tax Cuts for the Rich) by Charles Blahous, a research fellow with the Hoover Institution.

Liberalism Explained: The "Herd" of Independent Minds

Why do liberals bitterly cling to their cults and mantras, impervious to rational counter-arguments and sound evidence? Victor Volsky offers an interesting theory called the "collective shaming code," a concept developed by Thomas Huxley ("Darwin's Bulldog") and further explored by Lee Harris in his book, The Suicide of Reason.

Huxley concluded that the shaming code was "the glue that holds together individuals in a group" in order to increase their individual chances of survival.

"It is this code that makes the members of the group feel as one," writes Lee Harris. "They are disgusted, angered, delighted and shamed by the same things. The unanimity of their visceral response is what provides the powerful sense of collective identity. It makes them feel and think as a tribal Us, in contrast to those tribes who are not disgusted by what disgusts us, or made angry by what makes us angry, and who feel no shame at what we think of as shameful[.] ... A tribe that shares a powerful visceral code that inhibits the natural tendency of the individual to self-assertion will present a united front against its enemies." ...

Lopez: It's Not a War of the Sexes

NRO's Kathryn Lopez has an enjoyable interview with Dr. Elizabeth Kantor, author of The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After, in which Kantor probes the characters of Austen's six books for insights into male and female psychology and relationships.  Here are a few excerpts of the interview:

LOPEZ: Is Austen’s advice for all ages? Or is there a particular age range that may find your book of particular use? Is this all very silly if you’re over a certain age?
KANTOR: I don’t think anybody is too old to learn from Jane Austen. She herself was eventually a 40-year-old spinster who had given up any prospect of marriage for herself. But I don’t think she ever stopped being a great role model for all of us. When the secret that she was the author of Pride and Prejudice was getting out, her comment was, “What a trifle it is, in all its bearings, to the really important points of existence even in this world.” The most important things in her life were relationships — with her sister, with her nieces and nephews. Her novels are about finding “relationships” in the romantic sense, but I certainly benefit from her insights and her heroines’ example in my married life. And for women who feel like it may be too late for love — well, that’s the exact scenario of her novel Persuasion.

LOPEZ: Is this book more an Austen fan’s indulgence at a market opportunity? Do you see it as a help to a wounded culture?
KANTOR: There is an awful lot of pain and misery out there; modern relationships seem to have hit a brick wall. Doing the research for the book, I kept noticing how bitter many single women are about men, something I was already to a certain extent familiar with, but, even more, how very resentful of women a lot of single men are.
It’s not universal, of course. But modern mating habits don’t seem to be contributing much harmony and bliss to the human race. Jane Austen can offer each sex a refreshing alternative approach to the other — more mutual respect, more intelligence about how to get what we want from each other, but in a way that’s neither manipulative nor ham-fisted.

LOPEZ: What would Jane Austen make of Fifty Shades of Grey? Of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes? Of our interest in any of these things?
KANTOR: I actually wrote a piece for the Huffington Post pointing out how the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon seems to suggest that women have some desires that aren’t being met in their relationships today, and trying to show how exactly the kind of love we see between Elizabeth and Darcy is an ultimately more satisfying outlet for those desires.
Reading erotica is just playing at a love that’s risky and powerful and life-altering. Jane Austen was more ambitious than that. She gives us pictures of how women can find a thrilling, transformative love that fits into real life, right in the middle of all the humdrum things we’re perpetually pestered with, like financial worries and annoying relatives. I think she’d advise us to forget about vicarious excitements, whether it’s reading trashy fiction or following the lives of the rich and famous, and figure out how our own lives can be more satisfying and exciting.

Koch: Fighting for Economic Freedom

Billionaire businessman Charles Koch, who has been demonized by the progressive left, penned an article explaining why he fights for economic freedom. "Nations with the greatest degree of economic freedom tend to have citizens who are much better off in every way," he writes, adding that "the tendency of our own government here in the U.S. has been to grow bigger and bigger, controlling more and more." He argues that government growth comes with a "devil's bargain," cronyism, and income inequality:

Citizens who over-rely on their government to do everything not only become dependent on their government, they end up having to do whatever the government demands. In the meantime, their initiative and self-respect are destroyed.

It was President Franklin Roosevelt who said: “Continued dependence on [government support] induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.”

Businesses can become dependents, too. If your struggling car company wants a government bailout, you’ll probably have to build the government’s car – even if it’s a car very few people want to buy.

Many businesses with unpopular products or inefficient production find it much easier to curry the favor of a few influential politicians or a government agency than to compete in the open market.

After all, the government can literally guarantee customers and profitability by mandating the use of certain products, subsidizing production or providing protection from more efficient competitors.
 ...
Cronyism enables favored companies to reap huge financial rewards, leaving the rest of us – customers and competitors alike – worse off.

One obvious example of this involves wind farms. Most cannot turn a profit without the costly subsidies the government provides. Meanwhile, consumers and taxpayers are forced to pay an average of five times more for wind-generated electricity.
 ...
Some people worry about the disparity of wealth in a system of economic freedom. What they don’t realize is that the same disparity exists in the least-free countries.

The difference is who is better off.

Under economic freedom, it is the people who do the best job of producing products and services that make people’s lives better.

On the other hand, in a system without economic freedom, the wealthiest are the tyrants who make people’s lives miserable.

As a result of this, the income of the poorest in the least-free countries is one-tenth of what it is in the freest.

U.S. Energy Promises 3.6 Million Jobs

The U.S. fossil fuel energy news — and its potential for rebuilding our stalled economy — gets better and better. Citigroup Inc. estimated in a March report that a 'reindustrialization' of America could add as many as 3.6 million jobs by 2020 and increase the gross domestic product by as much as 3 percent. Bloomberg's Asjylyn Loder reports:

• U.S. natural gas production will expand to a record this year, and oil output swelled in July to its highest point since 1999.
• A surge in U.S. natural gas development has spurred $226 billion in spending plans on pipelines, storage, processing facilities and power plants, most slated for the next five years.
• The expansion of fossil-fuel production - coupled with a weak economy and increased energy efficiency - has helped the U.S. pare its crude oil imports by 17 percent since the 2005 peak
• Increased production and swelling domestic stockpiles have helped make energy cheaper in the U.S. than in other countries.
• So far, the economic benefits have been confined to states such as Louisiana, Texas, and North Dakota, but there are signs the economic gains have begun to expand beyond the oil and gas fields to industries from steel, aluminum, automobiles, fertilizers and chemicals. Orascom Construction Industries, for example, is investing $250 million restarting an ammonia and methanol plant in Texas, and another Orascom subsidiary may build a $1.3 billion fertilizer plant in Iowa that would create as many as 2,000 construction jobs and 165 permanent positions.

"This is one of those rare opportunities that every country looks for and few ever get," said Phillip Verleger, a former director of the office of energy policy at the U.S. Treasury Department and founder of PKVerleger LC, a consulting firm in Carbondale, Colorado. "This abundance of energy gives us an opportunity to rebuild our economy."

Full story: America's Energy Seen Adding 3.6 Million Jobs Along with 3% GDP.

"School Reform Gets Cool"

"A whole lot of 20- and 30-somethings across the political spectrum now believe something’s seriously flawed in our public-education system," writes Naomi Schaefer Riley. Why the sea-change?

• Teach for America has for decades place recent graduates from top colleges — some 28,000 to date — as teachers in some of the nation's worst schools. "The incompetence and corruption are hard to forget," and "they talk about it to their peers, too."
• Urban areas are looking attractive to hip younger people who are marrying and starting families, and the terrible state of urban schools presents a roadblock to be challenged and overcome.
• Teachers unions are looking like dinosaurs bent on protecting undeserving members while preventing kids from getting a decent education.
• Vouchers, charter schools, and parent-trigger laws have become "the hot cause of the millennial generation."

"Finally," concludes Riley, "a popular trend worth getting behind."

Epstein: The Obamacare Quagmire

"Now that the Supreme Court has held President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) constitutional, mounting evidence suggests that the statute’s most ardent defenders may well come to rue the day," writes constitutional law expert Richard Epstein.  Why? Because advocates "failed to take into account the old and powerful law of unintended consequences." Epstein maintains the law will hurt the very people it's supposed to help.

• Federal and state officials must grapple with implementing the law whose internal complexity and flawed design make it a program that was built to fail.
• The fine print of the ACA could leave dependents of millions of low-income employees without coverage from either an employer or an ACA insurance exchange.
• Many states may choose not to set up insurance exchanges at all, which would leave  low-income residents in those states with no access to the subsidies proponents promised them.
• The ACA requires every insurance plan cover, among other things, "ambulatory patient services, emergency services, hospitalization, maternity and newborn care, mental health and substance abuse disorder services, prescription drugs, rehabilitative and habilitative services and devices, laboratory services, preventive and wellness services, chronic disease management, and pediatric services" [even for plans purchased by 21-year-old single, healthy, childless males]. 
• Insurers can no longer require insurance applicants to disclosed their health conditions and have no way to determine their relevant risk or estimate the potential cost in future care.
• Fearing that private insurance companies will be driven out of business by the ACA before states exchanges are up and running, the government has issued more than 1000 employer waivers involving over 3 million people.

None of this should come as a surprise. The ACA was sold with a set of promises that were not sustainable. President Obama trumpeted his program with reassuring words in June 2009: “No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise: . . . If you like your healthcare plan, you will be able to keep your healthcare plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.” He has repeated that vow since. As David Hyman and I have shown, the ACA violates that promise in multiple ways.

The Act’s potential disruptions are not just confined to people who are forced into the exchanges; it extends to all individuals regardless of how they procure their healthcare insurance. All that can be said with confidence is that, thus far, the ACA has not been able to defeat the law of unintended consequences. Whether this nation will be able to extricate itself from the ObamaCare quagmire remains to be seen.

"Same-Sex Marriage and the Manufacture of Consent"

"Ninety years ago, Walter Lippmann wrote about the “manufacture of consent,” in his classic work Public Opinion,” write Doug Mainwaring and Stella Morabito in the Washington Examiner. "The general idea was that public opinion was becoming increasingly susceptible to manipulation by elites."

Most people today don’t have time to deal with the complexities of issues. Instead, they tend to take cues from the media and what they assume others are thinking. Especially in climates of fear, public opinion is less a reflection of what people really believe than it is an operative nudge to elicit approval or disapproval among the public.

This is clearly the case today as the shroud of political correctness suppresses open debate and aligns with the manipulation of polling numbers to push forward a perception of plausibility for a most implausible idea: same-sex marriage.

Competing Deficit Reduction Plans: Simpson-Bowles vs. Paul Ryan

Unlike the President's 2012 budget (which was rejected unanimously by both the House and Senate in May), both the 2010 Simpson-Bowles Deficit Reduction Commission plan and the 2012 House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan plan, called the Path to Prosperity, earned respect for their serious, bipartisan efforts to bring federal deficits under control. 

William Beach of The Heritage Foundation praised Simpson-Bowles for getting "the right conversation started."

Yes, the final report would have benefited from no tax hikes, more entitlement reform and bigger spending cuts. But it was encouraging to see political appointees and politicians finally engage in the necessary work to save this country from the future we see in France, Great Britain and Greece. As these and other nations are showing, when the government runs out of other people's money, it can be a very bad thing. This is particularly true if you are under 30 and have your entire economic life ahead of you...

And Erskine Bowles praised the Ryan plan and its author:

AEI: 3 Things You Should Know about Paul Ryan's Medicare Reform - in 100 Words

"Clip and save" these "key facts about Paul Ryan's approach to saving Medicare," writes James Pethokoukis at AEI:

1. No one over the age of 55 would be affected in any way.

2. Traditional Medicare fee-for-service would remain available for all. “Premium support”—that is, government funding of private insurance plans chosen by individuals—is an option for those who choose it. No senior would be forced out of the traditional Medicare program against his will.

3. Overall funding for Medicare under the Ryan-Wyden plan is scheduled to grow at the same rate as under President Obama’s proposals. Is this “gutting Medicare” and “ending Medicare as we know it”? In reality, it’s the market giving seniors cheaper, higher quality choices they can take if they wish, with the traditional program remaining an option.

Who is Paul Ryan?

In Man With a Plan, reporter Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard traces Paul Ryan's career from his early college days as a Capitol Hill summer intern to how he became the intellectual leader of his party.

UPDATE — via powerlineblog.com the opening lines of Ryan's CPAC speech:

There are those who say modern society is too complicated for the average man or woman to deal with. This is a long-standing argument, but we heard it more frequently after the mortgage credit collapse and financial meltdown in 2008. They say we need more experts and technocrats making more of our economic decisions for us. And they argue for less “political interference” with the enlightened bureaucrats … by which they mean less objection by the people to the overregulation of society. 

If we choose to have a federal government that tries to solve every problem, then as long as society keeps growing more complex, government must keep on growing right along with it. The rule of law by the people must be reduced and the arbitrary discretion of experts expanded. . .

If the average American can’t handle complexity in his or her own life, and only government experts can … then government must direct the average American about how to live his or her life. Freedom becomes a diminishing good.
But there’s a major flaw in this “progressive’” argument, and it’s this. It assumes there must be someone or some few who do have all the knowledge and information. We just have to find, train, and hire them to run the government’s agencies.

Friedrich Hayek called this collectivism’s “fatal conceit.” The idea that a few bureaucrats know what’s best for all of society, or possess more information about human wants and needs than millions of free individuals interacting in a free market is both false and arrogant. It has guided collectivists for two centuries down the road to serfdom — and the road is littered with their wrecked utopias. The plan always fails!

Pethokoukis: Fed Caused Great Recession, Not Bushonomics

So says a new book by Robert Hetzel, senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. James Pethokoukis at AEI gets in the economic weeds so we don't have to.  He writes:

The president argues that it was the unchecked, reckless, casino capitalism of the George W. Bush years — bank deregulation, tax cuts for the rich — that lead to the nation’s worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. And if Mitt Romney is elected in November, the Republican will bring those policies right back, risking another financial collapse.

But a book by Robert Hetzel, a senior economist at Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, says it wasn’t Bushonomics or greedy bankers or broken markets that caused the Great Recession. In The Great Recession: Market Failure or Policy Failure, Hetzel pins the blame squarely on the Federal Reserve and Team Bernanke.

Answering Stupid Statements

Richard Fulmer at ricochet.com says "sometimes a question is the best response" to stupid liberal comments, so he offers a few snappy questions to stupid answers that will bring a smile:

Answer: I am a true solipsist. (Gorgias)
Question: So why tell me?

A: There is no truth. (Gustave Flaubert)
Q: Is that true?

A: Knowledge is unknowable. (Francisco Sanches)
Q: How do you know?

A: It is irrational to assume that tomorrow will be anything like today. (David Hume)
Q: So you learned to speak, read, and write because…?

A: All cultures are equally valid. (Franz Boas)
Q: Including those that teach that all other cultures are invalid?

A: Truth is created, not discovered. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
Q: Did you just make that up?

A: There is no free will. (Baron d’Holbach)
Q: What makes you say that?

York: Voter Fraud IS a Concern

The argument against Voter ID laws becomes much harder to make when 1,099 felons vote in race won by 312 ballots, as happened in the Minnesota Senate race between Al Franken and Norm Coleman. Byron York cites a new book, Who's Counting, that catalogues the whole range of voter fraud issues and maintains "the integrity of the ballot box is just as important to the credibility of elections as access to it."

Chick-fil-A, Gays, Marriage, and Tolerance

Chick-Fil-A had a great day Wednesday, as did the millions of Americans who quietly showed their support for traditional marriage, free speech, and free enterprise. Fr. Dwight Longenecker called it “the triumph of the ordinary.”

Yesterday’s Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day was the sort of ‘revolt’ this country needs, but it was even better than the non violent revolutions and peaceful protests which have changed the world because it was so ordinary. It was just plain, ordinary Americans getting in their cars and doing a plain, ordinary American thing: going out for lunch to a fast food joint. It was just plain, ordinary Americans doing something plain and ordinary, but positive and joyful and good. In buying an ordinary tasty chicken sandwich at their corner fast food emporium ordinary Americans were expressing the wish to be left alone to be ordinary Americans.

Gays, lesbians, and bisexuals are a tiny fraction of the U.S. population—3.5% at most, according to demographer Gary J. Gates of the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at UCLA. (The population is even smaller in the United Kingdom, where a national 2010 Integrated Household Survey found that only 1.5% of Britons say they are gay, lesbian or bisexual.)

Yet they so militantly promote their lifestyle and agenda that they have fooled many Americans into believing that they are a much larger segment of the population.

A 2011 Gallup survey found that only 4% of American adults estimated—correctly—that gays and lesbians were less than 5% of the U.S. population.  Over half (52%) of adults in the U.S. thought 1 in 5 Americans were gay, and 35% of adults thought 1 in 4 were gay.  Women, young people, lower-income and less educated Americans have been snookered most (see chart below):

Americans with lower incomes and less education give the highest estimates, on average, of the U.S. gay and lesbian population, and far higher estimates than those with higher incomes and more education. Americans aged 18 to 29 give a higher average estimate than older Americans, and women give a far higher average estimate than men.

"For all the talk of the traditional marriage supporters being full of hate, there was not hatred apparent” on Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day, notes Fr. Longenecker.  Hate is the currency of the Left these days: Hate for centuries of traditions and definitions that don’t suit its contemporary whims. Hate for speech that isn’t synonymous with its own. Hate for a free-enterprise system that refuses to buckle to the un-ordinary demands of a tiny segment of the population.

No, no hate Wednesday, just (as Fr. Longenecker put it) "ordinary Americans sticking up for their way of life by buying a chicken sandwich with their friends and neighbors.”