Progressives' War on the Economy

Several recent articles illustrate the painful economic consequences of liberal-progressive rule. Contrast these against the final article below showing the economy of Texas under conservative rule.

Real Household Incomes Fall 5.9% Under Obama — "From this analysis, Americans have lost real income gains during an economic recovery for the first time in American history."

ObamaCare Slows Hiring, Raises Prices in 5 States: Fed Survey — "In a Philadelphia Fed survey of regional manufacturers out Thursday, 18% said they employ fewer workers due to the Affordable Care Act than they would in its absence. Just 3% say employment levels are higher as a result. Further, 18% said part-timers make up a greater share of workers due to ObamaCare ... just 1.5% said they've scaled back part-time work in response."

Government Dependency in America Nears Tipping Point -- "New data on federal public assistance programs show we've reached an ignominious milestone: More than 100 million Americans are getting some form of 'means-tested' welfare assistance..." [chart right].

Now consider this from AEIdeas:

Chart of the Day: Texas Jobs — "The chart tells a powerful and important story about the strength of the Texas economy, which has experienced an employment increase of more than 1.3 million workers since late 2007. In contrast, civilian employment in the other 49 states is still almost 1.3 million jobs below the December 2007 level!"

Donatelli: What Part of Constitution Do Liberals Still Support?

"[W]hat is most radically different about the Obama liberals’ interpretation of the Constitution is its neutering of the Bill of Rights," writes Frank Donatelli. "To be sure, liberals never had much good to say about the Second, Ninth and 10th Amendments, but now they’re striking at other amendments, even those they once revered."

Donatelli highlights several examples of liberals' recent abandonment of the Fifth and (perhaps most surprisingly) First Amendment rights as well.

Ironically, the only constitutional provision to limit government power that liberals still champion is the right of “privacy,” which of course is found nowhere in the Constitution.

In recent years, many Democrats have sought to rebrand “liberalism” and “progressivism.” This is not just a cosmetic name change. Liberals of a generation ago accepted limits on government action, especially those limits contained in the Bill of Rights. Progressives, by contrast, have always found limits on their power to be inconvenient. ...  If progressive government in this administration has taught us anything, it is that liberties that run counter to great progressive ambitions are in serious danger.

Social Media: Faster Way to Spread Evil and Good

Alex Byers @ Politico makes an interesting case that "social media was the kerosene that turned fire in Ferguson into a national blaze." Why?  Because “social networks like Twitter highlight tensions in the moment rather than calm them ... On the ground, social networks have been a key part of how protesters have organized and established a support system. It’s also given a digital megaphone to those who have taken a leading role in the demonstrations…”

Added to ISIL’s video of journalist James Foley’s beheading and Jihadists' successful use of new media to organize globally, it’s a reminder that technology has merely given us a newer, more rapid communications system which, like communications systems of old, can be used to spread evil as well as good.  The question is whether its great speed will diminish, rather than strengthen, our individual and collective capacity for critical thought and problem solving.

See #Ferguson: Social Media More Spark Than Solution

How Relationships Today Affect Success of Marriages Later

"A new study shows that the more relationships you've had prior to marriage, the less likely you'll have a good marriage," writes Mollie Hemingway, reporting on a new study from the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia.

She highlights findings in the study that point to the kinds of sound pre-marital decisions made today can improve our chances of marital quality and success. Read more in What You Do Before you Say 'I Do' Matters for Marriage Happiness.

So We Went Naked for Nothing?!?

"A team of security researchers from the University of San Diego, the University of Michigan, and Johns Hopkins plans to reveal their own results from months of testing [the] same model of scanner"—TSA's Rapiscan full-body x-ray scanner—that made us virtually naked to TSA at airports for years, reports wired.com.

"Not only did [researchers] find that [a] weapon-hiding tactic worked; they also found that they could pull off a disturbing list of other possible tricks, such as using teflon tape to conceal weapons against someone's spine, installing malware on the scanner's console that spoofed scans, or simply molding plastic explosives around a person's body to make it nearly indistinguishable from flesh in the machine's images..."

Read the rest to find out how costly the security illusion was and where these scanners are still being used.

Liberty with Virtue or Vice

Rachel Lu has a thought-provoking article on the much blogged-about “libertarian moment.” She examines the differences between the “libertine libertarian” perspective (a 'vice' focused liberty leading to James Poulos’s pink police state) and “conventional libertarian” perspective (a 'virtue' focused liberty leading to smaller government undergirded by stronger family, community, and economic systems), and what’s at stake for Millennials going forward.

In If Millennials Want Liberty, They Need Virtue, Too, the author concludes:

“I do not believe this grim dystopia is inevitable. Human cultures are remarkably dynamic, and ours has ‘good bones’; we still have a chance to show young Americans that there are better alternatives than the tired non-solutions of the progressive Left. But we have to understand that the culture wars and the size-of-government wars are connected on a deep level. If we can’t persuade the young to embrace some version of conventional morals, promises of prosperity and greater autonomy will not save our Republic. …

“The good news is that Millennials, although largely dismissive of conventional morality, have only the vaguest notion of what they are rejecting. A relatively superficial makeover may be enough to make old ideas seem exciting and new. But the project is most likely to succeed if we can seize the libertarian moment by re-committing ourselves to the fusionist compromise. Libertarians and social conservatives do need each other, and not only for the purposes of building a winning coalition. We need each other in order to present a complete and satisfying conservative vision.”

Judge Demands Answers from IRS After Contradictory Testimony

U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan (AP)

"U.S. District court Judge Emmet Sullivan Thursday ordered the Internal Revenue Service to come up with new answers after IRS employees contradicted sworn testimony about damage to Lois Lerner's hard drive," reports the Daily Caller.

Sullivan ruled that “the IRS is hereby ORDERED to file a sworn Declaration, by an official with the authority to speak under oath for the Agency, by no later than August 22, 2014″ on four issues: the IRS’ attempted recovery of Lerner’s lost emails after her computer allegedly crashed, bar codes that could have been on the hard drive, IRS policies on hard drive destruction, and information about an outside vendor who worked on IRS hard drives.

Recent documents from nonprofit group Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the IRS, which Sullivan is presiding over, showed that IRS technology officials contradicted sworn testimony about damage to Lerner’s hard drive.

Aaron Signor, an IRS technician that looked at Lerner’s hard drive in June 2011, said in IRS court filings that he saw no damage to the drive before sending it off to another IRS technician, leading some in the media to suggest that the lost emails scandal is basically over. But Signor’s statement, issued in response to the Judicial Watch lawsuit, does not jibe with sworn congressional testimony. ...

Sullivan's order seems to have been motivated by the obvious contradiction. 

See also Judge Orders IRS to Turn Over More Info on Lois Lerner Emails.

Government's Role in Soaring College Costs

"Americans have watched in anguish as the cost of college has soared out of reach," write Investor's Business Daily editors. "What they don't know is that a big reason for rising costs is the surge in federal spending over the past 35 years."

A new report from the Center for College Affordability & Productivity tells a story many Americans probably haven't heard — that college costs are rising fast not only because of a flood of new students, but also because federal spending is pushing up costs across the board.

The sprawling college aid program, say authors Richard Vedder, Christopher Denhart and Joseph Hartge, "contributes to skyrocketing costs, finances a wasteful academic arms race, weakens academic standards, lowers educational opportunity and worsens the underemployment/overinvestment problem."

The report notes that tuition after inflation was increasing at a modest 1% a year before 1978. Since then, fees have ratcheted up 3% to 4% annually.

A big reason for this is the 1972 Pell Grant Program, which was greatly expanded in 1978 by President Carter to include middle-class families for the first time.

The "long trek back to affordability" for America's college students, the authors' argue, will begin by reining in costs and curbing the size and scope of federal spending on education.

Threat of EMP Attack on US and What to Do About It

"In a recent letter to investors, billionaire hedge-fund manager Paul Singer warned that an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, is 'the most significant threat' to the US and our allies in the world," write R. James Woolsey and Peter Vincent Pry in the Wall Street Journal.

He's right. Our food and water supplies, communications, banking, hospitals, law enforcement, etc., all depend on the electric grid. Yet until recently little attention has been paid to the ease of generating EMPs by detonating a nuclear weapon in orbit above the U.S., and thus bringing our civilization to a cold, dark halt. ...

The much neglected 2004 and 2008 reports by the congressional EMP Commission—only now garnering increased public attention—warn that "terrorists or state actors that possess relatively unsophisticated missiles armed with nuclear weapons may well calculate that, instead of destroying a city or a military base, they may gain the greatest political-military utility from one or a few such weapons by using them—or threatening their use—in an EMP attack." ...

What would a successful EMP attack look like? The EMP Commission, in 2008, estimated that within 12 months of a nationwide blackout, up to 90% of the U.S. population could possibly perish from starvation, disease and societal breakdown ....

What to do?

Surge arrestors, faraday cages and other devices that prevent EMP from damaging electronics, as well micro-grids that are inherently less susceptible to EMP, have been used by the Defense Department for more than 50 years to protect crucial military installations and strategic forces. These can be adapted to protect civilian infrastructure as well. The cost of protecting the national electric grid, according to a 2008 EMP Commission estimate, would be about $2 billion...

What is lacking in Washington is a sense of urgency. Lawmakers and the administration need to move rapidly to build resilience into our electric grid and defend against an EMP attack that could deliver a devastating blow to the U.S. economy and the American people. Congress should pass and the president should sign into law the Shield Act and CIPA as soon as possible. Literally millions of American lives could depend on it.

'Help me stay rich, Colorado'

"A grass roots group is running some terrific pro-fracking ads in Colorado," writes John Hinderaker. "They feature a Middle Eastern sheik and a Russian oligarch pleading with Coloradans to help them stay rich by suppressing the production of American energy. They are funny and true, and therefore highly effective."

Below the Sheik and the Oligarch:

He DID Build that Road!

Remember President Obama's you didn't build that attack on entrepreneurs, or Elizabeth Warren's assertion that businesses moved their goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for? A grandfather in Somerset, England has news for both of them.

A grandfather sick of roadworks near his home defied his council and built his own toll road allowing people to circumvent the disrupted section.

Opened on Friday, it’s the first private toll road built since cars became a familiar sight on British roads 100 years ago. Motorists pay £2 to travel each way and bypass the 14 miles diversion.

Mike Watts, 62, hired a crew of workmen and ploughed £150,000 of his own cash [about $253,000 US] into building a 365m long bypass road [less than one-quarter of a mile] in a field next to the closed A431. He reckons it will cost another £150,000 in upkeep costs and to pay for two 24 hour a day toll booth operators.

The A431 between Bristol and Bath was closed in February after a landslip caused huge cracks to appear in the road.

Quickly businesses in the area began to suffer - including the cafe and party supplies shop Mike runs with wife Wendy Rice, 52, in Bath.

"It used to just be a very quick drive for us to Bath, but we were having to do a 14 mile detour which was taking up to an hour down tiny lanes just not designed to take the traffic," Mike said.

Father of four Mike asked his friend John Dinham if he would mind renting him the field until Christmas and hired three workmen to help build the road in just 10 days.

'Young Outsiders' Reject Welfare State

"A newly coined voting block called Young Outsiders has two major attributes — they are socially liberal and fiscally conservative. Really fiscally conservative," writes Kara Mason @ thecollegefix.com.

An overwhelming majority of these Millennial-aged voters actually think government aid does more harm than good, that the government is at its max when it comes to helping the poor, and – get this – that people on the government dole have it way too easy.

These “Young Outsiders” – named by the Pew Research Center in its recently released political typology report, make up about 13 percent of the voting population and could very well swing future elections in Republicans’ favor, research finds. ...

A whopping 86 percent of Young Outsiders believe “government aid to the poor does more harm than good.” What’s more, more than three-fourths of them, 76 percent, said the government can’t afford to help the poor any more than it already is.

And an overwhelming 81 percent agreed that “poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.”

Are Government Tax Breaks for Businesses Bad?

Not long ago, a student participating in one of our campus focus groups raised the question as to whether government tax breaks and incentives for businesses are always a bad idea. C. Edmund Wright puts the question into perspective in The Three Faces of Cronyism.

Wright argues that crony capitalism (or crony government, crony socialism, or corporatism) has three forms, and while none is good, each is different in the degree of the harm it does.

• The first — the least harmful form — is when governments offer tax breaks and incentives for big industrial plants. Although it is cronyism, there can be a "potentially redeeming cost/benefit outcome for taxpayers."

• The second — which Wright calls the "GE Jeff Immelt Model" — is when a "company cozies up to government in order to get regulations and laws passed that punish their competitors." This and the next form of cronyism "have no redemptive value whatsoever, and are purely diabolical corruptions of power and influence.  ... Government is picking winners and losers within their jurisdiction."

• The third — which Wright calls the "Solyndra Model" — is when government officials line the pockets of their friends and supporters using the government treasury for no benefit to anyone except their pals. "Again, almost everybody loses except the handful of donors, candidates and phony entrepreneurs involved directly."

Observes Wright, "Conservatives should certainly keep the pressure up on exposing and stamping out cronyism wherever they can. But let's not get distracted. Our Founders charged us with establishing and maintaining a more perfect union, not a utopia. Stamping out the worst of the crony deals would be a lot more perfect situation than we have now."

The Economics of Sex and Manhood

"Every day seems to feature a new complaint about the state of manhood in society," write Gannon LeBlanc and Bjarna O'Brien, who argue that birth control, the rise of feminism and "good old rational self-interest" have enabled men to extend adolescence well into their twenties.

Birth control and the rise of feminism has made the “price” of sex very cheap. By price, we are not talking strictly about a dollar value, but rather about opportunity cost. Back in our grandparents’ day before birth control was widely accessible, women collectively kept the price of sex very high because of the high risk of pregnancy. A hook-up culture was simply infeasible because women did not have access to birth control to effectively prevent pregnancy or the economic independence required to support a child on their own. A woman had to be able to trust that if she became pregnant, the man would stick around and be a good father and husband. As a result, women made men work, and work hard, to have sex with them and expected their suitors to have an honorable reputation, a good job, and an education.

Once birth control became more accessible and acceptable in society and once women gained more economic opportunities, women could virtually unshackle themselves from the biological risks associated with pregnancy and become more promiscuous. While this was great in the eyes of feminists, who believed that women should be equal to men and shouldn’t be shamed for their sexual desires or activities, this transition came with tradeoffs. Instilling a culture of promiscuity increased the supply of sex available to men, yet the demand for sex from men never changed. When supply skyrockets and demand doesn’t move, price plummets. This is called a supply shock.

Women have set the price of sex so low that men now have no incentive to compete for female favor. Unlike their forefathers, men today don’t need to have a solid job, good manners, be in top physical shape, or have a strong sense of honor to get sex. More often than not, taking a girl out to dinner and inviting her back to his place can be enough. Granted, having the above qualities can make men more successful in the dating game, but it doesn’t incentivize them to be more committed. In fact, supply is so high that this has the opposite effect. The more successful a man is with women, the less incentivized he is to enter a committed, monogamous relationship.

 Read The Economics of Sex: Where Have All the Good Men Gone?

'War on Women' Not Polling Well With Women

A few days ago we asked if the 'War on Women' tactic was working for liberals. Now we learn from a National Journal report that it is not:

"[Saying] 'Republicans are waging a war on women' actually doesn't test very well," said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. "Women find it divisive, political -- they don't like it."

So Democratic candidates, who need to expand their margins among female voters and bring unmarried women to the polls in November, are shifting the language they use to pitch these issue to voters. Instead of the "war," Lake said, testing has shown more effective language casts Republicans' positions as "too extreme" or the GOP as "out of touch with women's lives."