Harzani: 'War on Women' Schtick

Colorado proves the 'War on Women' schtick is coming for conservatives "whether you deserve it or not," writes David Harzani @ federalist.com. His post about the Colorado U.S. Senate race between challenger Cory Gardner and incumbent Mark Udall notes that the two are in a virtual tie, and 'War on Women' charges are flying.

As soon as Gardner cleared the GOP field, Udall ran an indictment against the Republican for imaginary crimes against women. The wonky Gardner, claimed Udall, has "championed a crusade" — a crusade — to "outlaw" birth control.

Now, I couldn’t find a single vote or speech or gaffe in which Gardner advocates for restrictions on birth control. Not during his time in congress or in the Colorado legislature or anywhere else, for that matter. Perhaps I missed something. Perhaps someone will soon unearth explosive video to share. Nothing in his record, though, indicates he’s a zealous culture warrior.  

Harzani has his own ideas on "meeting these sorts of attacks head on."

...it’ll be worth reminding Coloradans (often) that Udall, who allegedly believes the brave women of America have an enduring right to make their own health-care decisions, is a cheerleader of coerced participation in a state-run program that has separated thousands of Colorado women from their doctors. This not only highlights his hypocrisy, but makes him defend Obamacare.

And since this is a war, Gardner can do better. Instead of running from the debate, it would also be worth pointing out that as Udall is himself an extremist on the issue of abortion; a supporter of late-term abortions — a position that most Americans find repugnant. In fact, some polls show that the 20-week abortion ban is more popular among women than men. A Quinnipiac poll found that 60 percent of women support unrestricted abortions for only the first 20 weeks of pregnancy. Only 50 percent of men support the 20-week limit.  Other polls found similar results. [snip]

The War on Women shtick will be branching out to include the minimum wage and immigration, as well as income equality – and everything  else, really. And Colorado proves that it’s coming for you whether you deserve it or or not. Because even if you’re not Todd Akin, they know you really are.

Bedard: ObamaCare Will Reduce Wages Says Union Report

"A national union that represents 300,000 low-wage hospitality workers charges in a new report that Obamacare will slam wages, cut hours, limit access to health insurance and worsen the very 'income equality' President Obama says he is campaigning to fix," writes Paul Bedard.

Unite Here warned that due to Obamacare's much higher costs for health insurance than what union workers currently pay, the result will be a pay cut of up to $5 an hour. "If employers follow the incentives in the law, they will push families onto the exchanges to buy coverage. This will force low-wage service industry employees to spend $2.00, $3.00 or even $5.00 an hour of their pay to buy similar coverage," said the union in a new report.

Union head Donald "D." Taylor, in a note also being sent to Congress, demands changes and admits to being reluctant to bash a president his union supported.

"Believe me; I enter this entire debate about the consequences of the ACA with a deep reluctance,” he wrote. “Unite Here was the first union to endorse then-Senator Obama. We support the addition of health care to millions of Americans. Yet facts are facts, and Obamacare will cost our members the equivalent of a significant pay cut to keep their hard-won benefits.”

Taylor also suggested that Democrats in Washington are telling unions to stop griping about the impact of Obamacare on their members. He quoted a Senate aide saying, “Labor needs to regress to the mean.” Said Taylor: “In other words, roll back what you have and take one for the team. Ironic, given that Congress and the president carved out an exemption for staffers on the ACA. We cannot sit idly by as the politicians carve up our health plans while they carve out exceptions for themselves and every special interest feeding at the trough in Washington.”

Union's Report: The Irony of ObamaCare: Making Inequality Worse

Hanson: The Thin Thread of Civilization

"I've always hoped that these gloom-and-doomers were wrong about the Western paradigm," writes Victor Davis Hanson, "but some days it becomes harder." Hanson takes a somber look at the ironies, contrasts and themes of modern cultural life against the predictions of past philosophers.

Over 90 million Americans who could work are not working (the “non-institutionalized” over 16). What we take for granted — our electrical power, fuel, building materials, food, health care, and communications — all hinge on just 144 million getting up in the morning to produce what about 160-170 million others (the sick, the young, and the retired who need assistance along with the 90 million idle) consume. ...[snip]

A shrinking percentage of our population feeds us, finds our energy, protects us, and builds things we count on. They get up each morning to do these things, in part in quest for the good life, in part out of a sense of social obligation and basic humanity, in part because they know they will die if idle and thrive only when busy, and in part simply because “they like it.”

We can stack the deck against them with ever higher taxes, ever more regulations, ever more obligations to others, and they may well continue. But not if we also damn them as the “1%” and call them the agents of inequality and the fat cats who did not build what they built or who profited when they should not have.

You cannot expect the military to protect us, and then continually order it to reflect every aspect of postmodern American sensitivity in a risky premodern world. Filing a lawsuit to divert a river’s water to the sea during a drought is a lot easier and cleaner than welding together well-casings at sea. Last week, an off-duty armed correctional officer in Fresno intervened in a wild carjacking, shooting and killing the gang-member killer and thus limiting his carnage to one death and two woundings rather than five or six killings — at the very moment Harvey Weinstein — of guns-blazing Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction fame and profits — promised to destroy the NRA.

These contrasts say everything about the premodern, the postmodern and the innocent who pay the tab in-between.

Hanson's three-page essay, The Last Generation of the West and the Thin Strand of Civilization, offers a persuasive reminder that the preservation of civilization rests on each generation's shoulders.

Solution to Income Inequality is Marriage

"Marriage inequality is a substantial reason why income inequality exists," writes Ari Fleischer in the Wall Street Journal, and he presents considerable research to make his case.

...among families headed by two married parents in 2012, just 7.5% lived in poverty. By contrast, when families are headed by a single mother the poverty level jumps to 33.9%. [snip]

Attitudes toward marriage and having children have changed in America over the past 50 years, and low-income children and their mothers are the ones who are paying the price. ... As the Heritage [Foundation] study states: "The U.S. is steadily separating into a two-caste system with marriage and education as the dividing line. In the high-income third of the population, children are raised by married parents with a college education; in the bottom-income third, children are raised by single parents with a high-school diploma or less." One of the differences between the haves and the have-nots is that the haves tend to marry and give birth, in that order. The have-nots tend to have babies and remain unmarried. ...

Given how deep the problem of poverty is, taking even more money from one citizen and handing it to another will only diminish one while doing very little to help the other. A better and more compassionate policy to fight income inequality would be helping the poor realize that the most important decision they can make is to stay in school, get married and have children—in that order.

Is Pope Francis Promoting Sin?

That's the gist of an article by Harvard School of Government professor Lant Pritchett, and his thought-provoking argument will resonate with many conservatives and make a few liberals angry.

By dwelling on inequality, the pope is promoting envy. The Catholic Church, I had always understood, disapproves of envy, deeming it one of the seven deadly sins. I would have expected Francis to urge people to think of themselves in relation to God and to their own fullest potential. Encouraging people to measure themselves against others only leads to grief. Resenting the success of others is a sin in itself.

Pritchett cites chapter and verse to buttress his argument on the sin of envy, among them references to Cain and Abel, the Ten Commandments, and Annanias and Sapphira. The self-described "full-time preacher of economics" continues:

I am all for reducing poverty. I’ve spent most of my career working on that issue. I’m all for economic growth that’s inclusive and that raises the productivity and incomes of the poorest. I’m for social justice and attacking inequities. I’m against the privilege and corruption that denies opportunities to others. I am all for fairness, not least in economic affairs, and for state intervention when necessary to serve that purpose.

What I’m against is talking about “inequality” as if that term denoted any of those concerns. Poverty matters; injustice matters. Mere inequality is beside the point. [snip]

It’s argued most wealth ... comes not from creating value in a competitive market but from abuse of power, manipulation of markets or the entrenched advantages of inherited wealth. A lot of wealth surely does arise in that way. But this isn’t an argument against my point; it’s precisely my point. When we complain about inequality in the abstract we aren’t thinking about what is or isn’t fair or just or equitable. Those distinctions turn on the process that caused the inequality. So let’s stop talking about inequality and talk directly about the things we ought to care about: absolute deprivation, abusive power, rigged markets and unearned privilege.

Read his full article, Why is Pope Francis Promoting Sin?

Fracking Helps Poor More than Government Program

"No one is doing more to increase income inequality in America than the affluent environmentalists who oppose natural gas drilling" [i.e., fracking]. — Fracking and the Poor, Wall Street Journal

Fracking has so dramatically lowered the price of natural gas that it "shaved about $10 billion a year from the utility bills of poor families."

To put it another way, fracking is a much more effective antipoverty program than is Liheap [federal Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program]. In 2012, Liheap provided roughly $3.5 billion to about nine million low-income households to subsidize their home-heating costs. New drilling technologies saved poor households almost three times more. Low gas prices benefit nearly all poor households, while Liheap helps fewer than one in four.

You'd think that good liberal egalitarians would welcome these financial savings to poor households. Yet most green groups, in particular the Sierra Club, continue to oppose fracking and are using lawsuits and political lobbying to stop it. Rich Hollywood types like Matt Damon propagandize against it. No one is doing more to increase income inequality in America than the affluent environmentalists who oppose natural gas drilling.

Feminism's American Caste Society

Feminists were dead wrong: The single-motherhood revolution "has been an economic catastrophe for women," writes Kay Hymowitz, who calls it the makings of a caste society.

Defenders of the single-mother revolution often describe it as empowering for women, who can now free themselves from unhappy unions and live independent lives. That’s one way to look at it. Another is that it has been an economic catastrophe for those women.

Poverty remains relatively rare among married couples with children; the U.S. Census puts only 8.8 percent of them in that category... But over 40% of single-mother families are poor [and] of the two-fifths of bottom-quintile households that are families, 83% are headed by single mothers.

The Brookings Institution's Isabel Sawhill calculates that virtually all the increase in child poverty in the United States since the 1970s would vanish if parents still married at 1970 rates..."

Hymowitz highlights several studies that show married mothers (including 'shotgun' unions) are economically better off than single or co-habitating mothers. So are married fathers, it turns out. 

Liberty or Equality? We Can't Have Both

"Freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies ... to check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed." —"The Lessons of History," by Will and Ariel Durant

With liberals pushing tax hikes for the top 1% of Americans, former Senator Phil Gramm and Steve McMillan tackle liberals' misleading claims of income inequality in a lengthy Wall Street Journal article entitled, "The Real Causes of Income Inequality."

Nowhere is the political debate over income inequality more detached from reality than the call for the top 1% of American income earners to pay their "fair share." The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) data on the ratio of the share of income taxes paid by the richest taxpayers relative to their share of income show that the U.S. has the world's most progressive tax burden.

The top 10% of earners in the U.S. pay 35% more of the income tax burden than in Sweden and 22% more than in France. These figures—from the 2008 OECD publication "Growing Unequal?"—include all household taxes imposed on income at the federal, state and local level, including social insurance taxes.

In an eternal irony unique to large welfare states, it is the expansion of government in the name of the poor and middle class that always costs poor and middle-class families the most. When the U.S. collects 16.1% of GDP in income taxes, the top 10% of taxpayers pay 7.3% and the other 90% pick up 8.9%.

In France, however, they collect 24.3% of GDP in income taxes with the top 10% paying 6.8% and the rest paying a whopping 17.5% of GDP. Sweden collects its 28.5% of GDP through income taxes by tapping the top 10% for 7.6%, but the other 90% get hit for a back-breaking 20.9% of GDP.

If the U.S. spent and taxed like France and Sweden, it would hardly affect the top 10%, who would pay about what they pay now, but the bottom 90% would see their taxes double.

Since OECD members have significantly higher consumption taxes on average than the U.S., the total tax burden of bigger government is even more heavily borne by lower-income citizens in developed nations than these numbers suggest.

The real and alarming message in these OECD numbers is that there appear to be limits in the real world to how much tax blood can be extracted from rich turnips.

Hayward: The Dirty Little Secret of "Income Inequality"

One of the most basic problems with the whole 'income inequality' topic, writes John Hayward at Human Events, "is that people don't really understand what 'income' means any more. Do you really know what your precise weekly income is?" If you say either the 'net payable amount' or 'gross pay total' on your paycheck stub, you'd be wrong.

Citing numbers crunched by CATO Institute, Hayward notes that "much of the 'income inequality' battered about in the media is actually due to a rising share of income being delivered in the form of increasingly expensive health care benefits." As CATO's research reveals, the real problem isn't 'income inequality'—"the rich are getting richer slower than the rest of us are getting richer."

The problem is the government's stealth 'income diversion' from our paychecks:

[T]he whole idea behind paycheck withholding [is] grab those taxes before people even realize the money is gone. Very few of us have a clear idea of just how much of our money is “going,” or where it goes.