Filed under: Domestic Policy, Economy, Progressivism, Capitalism, Election 2012 | Tags: The Minimum Wage, Income From Gratuities, Waiters and Waitresses
In an election year, one of the big problems is that everyone wants to do nice things for their voters. They want to appeal to the heart. But your government does not love you, much as they try to make you think they do. They love getting re-elected. Case in point: Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) has introduced the Rebuild America Act. (Good names make it harder to vote against). Among other things, the Iowa Democrat wants to raise the minimum wage by 220% for employees who receive tip income, such as waiters and waitresses. Huh?
Seems like only yesterday, Congress was railing about waiters and waitresses not paying taxes on their tip income. Fact: the federal minimum wage for employees who earn tip income is $2.13 an hour. The Labor Department permits this lower minimum wage so long as the employee earns at least the full federal minimum wage of $7.25 when tips are included. If tips fall short of that amount, employers kick in the rest. According to Census Bureau data, the average hourly wage for a restaurant employee earning tip income is $11.82. Top earners can collect $24 an hour or more. It pays to be a nice waiter or waitress.
The difference between the two minimum wages is called the “tip credit.” It is a political acknowledgment of the single-digit profit margins in tipped industries, and of the income supplement that gratuities provide.
Economic studies show no relationship between a boost in restaurant employee base wages and their take-home compensation. A study that examined 20 years of Census Bureau data found that each time the mandatory state wage for tipped employees rose by 10%, hours worked fell by 5%.
Economists William Even and David Macpherson analyzed Sen. Harkin’s bill, and they estimate that the combined loss of hours would translate to the loss of 447,000 jobs. There are always consequences. Table-service restaurants have experimented with computer terminals tat allow customers to order and pay at the table. When a server is only carrying food to the table, restaurant jobs won’t be as lucrative.
Progressive politics is simple. Just make the employer pay more. The law of unintended consequences always applies. But if Sen. Harkin’s bill doesn’t pass, restaurant employees in Iowa will know (maybe) that he tried, which is the point.
Filed under: Election 2012, Humor, Politics, Progressivism | Tags: campaign ad, Caption Contest, Obama, Straw Men
I decided it’d be brilliant to mock Obama’s incessant use of straw men in the form of a campaign ad; unfortunately the brilliant punchline escapes me. So, I turn to our brilliant readers.
Ideally, I’d love to mock an actual Obama quote, campaign slogan, or soundbite — like this one — but it doesn’t have to; blurt out whatever comes to mind! It’s a brainstorm, not a test.
The best caption will win absolutely nothing of course — except credit, thanks, and a tiny modicum of eternal glory!
Have at it in the comments!…
Addendum: Someone on Twitter asked me what I meant by ‘straw men’. Good question! A ‘straw man’ is a type of fallacious argument that Obama uses very frequently. A ‘straw man’ argument misrepresents or outright lies about an opponent’s position (setting up the straw man), so that the person (Obama in this case) can easily knock it down. (Here’s the Wiki explanation).
Example: “My opponents want to make the poor and needy fend for themselves, but I think we can do better! My plan would make it possible for everyone to get affordable health care.” Obama sets up his straw man (a blatant lie about the Republican position), so that he can knock the straw man down. He does it virtually every day.
My only thoughts for captions so far were: “My opponents say…” (with Obama’s signature and the two pictured straw men). Or simply: ‘Setting ‘em up & knocking ‘em down”.
Hope that helps!
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Filed under: Capitalism, Democrat Corruption, Economy, Election 2012, Politics, Progressivism, Taxes | Tags: Chairman Paul Ryan, Former Chrm. Austan Goolsbee, Fox News Sunday
I don’t know if you watch Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace. I cannot embed the video, but you can watch it here. The debate was between former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers for President Obama,Austan Goolsbee, and Chairman of the House Budget Committee Paul Ryan. Paul Ryan mops the floor with Goolsbee.
Goolsbee demonstrates why the economy is still in the doldrums. It’s a pretty clear demonstration of how far apart the two sides are. If you believe in Keynesian stimulus, wasting taxpayer money on government bets on improbable energy companies invariably run by Obama bundlers or buddies, then you will find nothing untoward with Mr. Goolsbee’s claims. I would tell a kid of mine to avoid his classes. If you enjoy political confrontation, this is great fun.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Progressivism, Taxes | Tags: Eduardo Saverin, Facebook IPO, Senator Charles Schumer
One of the founders of Facebook, Eduardo Saverin, relinquished his U.S. citizenship in September 2011 , before the company announced its planned initial public offering of stock, which appears this week. He owns an estimated 4 percent of Facebook and stands to make an estimated $4 billion when the company goes public. The move is assumed be a financial one, for as a permanent resident of Singapore he would face no capital gains taxes.
Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY), lifetime politician, is outraged. The Democrats are in the midst of a War on the Wealthy, and waging war on Saverin will help the cause along if he can rouse up enough public indignation about the young man renouncing his citizenship. It is not like Saverin in escaping all taxes, expats have to pay a 15 percent tax on all unrealized capital gains when they renounce their citizenship — which would be more than he would have to pay if he doesn’t sell his Facebook shares. Only the shares he sold would be taxed. Saverin was born in Brazil, and has lived in Singapore since 2009.
Let’s assume that he decided to renounce his citizenship for financial reasons. Barack Obama with all his talk about “the Buffet Rule” has never grasped that nobody, including Warren Buffett is simply dying to pay more taxes. Obama simply thought he’d rouse up the envious, as a political ploy. Walter Wriston, onetime CEO of Citibank put it very succinctly in The Twilight of Sovereignty:
Capital will go where it is wanted and stay
where it is well treated. It will flee from manipulation
or onerous regulations of it value or use
and no government power can restrain it for long.
With the election of the new socialist president of France Francois Hollande, wealthy Frenchmen are in the process of moving to Britain. Californians are departing the Golden State for states with no income tax like Florida, Texas, Nevada or Washington. Wealthy residents of New Jersey, Governor Christie complains, are moving to other states and he wants to fix New Jersey’s tax system. The wealthy have options. Doctors from New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut are moving to Texas. John Kerry, the wealthiest man in the Senate, was famously mooring his yacht elsewhere to avoid Massachusetts taxes.
Democrats are ever so sure that if they just raise taxes on the wealthy high enough, they will raise revenue enough to take care of the budget deficit and the debt that the Republicans are always complaining about. If you get down into the details of taxation and revenue, you find that raising taxes usually brings in less revenue, and lowering taxes significantly raises revenue. It is counterintuitive, but true. When taxes are low, the well-to-do have more income to invest, and more expectation of profit from their investment — which is exactly what happens. And the government gets more revenue and more economic activity. When there is more investment, more people are put to work, and they pay taxes too. Outraged Democrats, who are sure that taxes on the richest nearing 100% will being in lots more money, have never been able to grasp that simple fact. They sneered, and called it “trickle-down economics” which was a misnomer.
Well, Schumer wants to charge anyone relinquishing their citizenship a whopping fee for the privilege (?). Next thing they’ll be building a wall to keep people in. Well, it’s all a political ploy, and you shouldn’t pay much attention. Saverin must be punished for following the law that the liberals wrote. Schumer also wants to punish him, if he does evade the taxation net, by barring him from ever returning to the U.S. Schumer wants to apply the law retroactively to all expatriates for the last ten years.
Pathetic, Mr. Schumer, really pathetic.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Election 2012, History, Progressivism | Tags: Another Economic Stimulus, big government, Ignorance of History
I didn’t expect to use the same image again so soon, but it fits this story even better. Obama believes in government spending (Boy, do we have evidence of that!) so much so that he refers to it as “investment.” Last Thursday, here in Seattle, reported the Wall Street Journal, he once again displayed his unfamiliarity with history — at least the parts that he has not inserted himself into.
“When I hear people talk about the free enterprise system and entrepreneurship, I try to remind them, you know, all of us made that investment in Darpa [the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] that helped to get the Internet started,” said Mr. Obama. “So there’s no Facebook, there’s no Microsoft, there’s no Google if we hadn’t made this common investment in our future.”
Microsoft—a product of the Internet? That may surprise Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who founded the software company in 1975. The company didn’t introduce its first Internet browser for another 20 years, and in the meantime it became the dominant computer software company long before the Internet became economically important. The irony of Mr. Obama’s error is that for much of Microsoft’s history the Internet was seen as a threat to its desktop dominance.
Darpa is engaged in funding research. This can be a proper role for government. But Darpa does not attempt to commercialize products. Facebook and Google, like Apple and Microsoft, were founded by private investors. In his State of the Union speech in January, Mr. Obama suggested that federal research spending “led to the computer chip.” Credit for the first integrated circuit has generally been awarded to Jack Kilby at a company called Texas Instruments back in 1958. Other innovations came from Bell Labs, Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel.
Mr. Obama’s error in his assumption that all prosperity flows from government, demonstrates why he keeps trying to solve problems by throwing money at them. Notably, he is putting pressure on Congress to approve another economic stimulus plan. “Each of the ideas on this list will help create jobs and build a stronger economy right now,” Mr. Obama said. Well, no they won’t.
He wants to give small businesses tax breaks for hiring more workers, but that’s not how it works. He wants to help homeowners to refinance their mortgages, he wants to help veterans find jobs. And he wants to spend up to $34.7 billion for those proposals — but that’s just a part of a more comprehensive $447 billion jobs program that Congress has mostly resisted, for good reason. And he really doesn’t want to cut spending at all— because he believes that spending is how you fix things. Calling spending “investment” leads you into strange pathways.
You would think that at this point one would learn from experience, but the One doesn’t. And that’s the real problem.
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Filed under: Domestic Policy, Economy, Health Care, Law, Progressivism | Tags: Obamacare, The Catholic Church, The Contraception Mandate
You remember, the huge disagreement between the Obama administration and the Catholic Church. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius issued a ruling that all organizations would have to pay for health insurance that covered contraceptives, sterilization and abortifacient drugs for all their employees or students. Ms. Sebelius is Catholic, so you would assume that she would understand the Church’s position.
When Catholic Bishops made the Church position clear, the Administration rewrote the mandate to say that the insurers would have to pay for the drugs and contraceptive, but this was merely a matter of words, not fact, as the Church would still be paying the bill. The administration obviously wasn’t taking the Catholic position seriously.
Franciscan University has announced that they will no longer cover health-insurance at all. Before, the Catholic institution required all students to carry health insurance, those who did not have insurance were required to buy it through the school. PPACA additionally increased the mandated maximum coverage amount for student policies to $100,000 for the next school year. Dozens of Catholic institutions have insisted that they will not comply, but the Obama administration has not been concerned, figuring that they would fall in line.
Here’s where it gets interesting. ObamaCare uses Social Security’s language of the Internal Revenue Code to determine who is eligible for “religious conscience” objection to the insurance mandate. The law provides exemptions for adherents of “recognized religious sects” that are “conscientiously opposed” to accepting benefits from any insurance, public or private.
So—Muslims may claim a religious exemption that is denied to Christians and Jews. Islam believes insurance is haraam (forbidden) and likens insurance to gambling, so the religion is excluded from requirements, mandates, or penalties set forth in the bill. Others who fall into the same category are the Amish, American Indians, and Christian Scientists. But not Catholics nor Jews. Although the U.S. Constitution grants all Americans equal protection of the law — some Americans are more equal than others.
Max Baucus (D-MT),Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee indicated that the purpose of ObamaCare is as much about redistributing income as it is about reforming health care. Another fine example of the iron fist of leftist government putting income distribution and religious discrimination in the hands of ‘wise’ government bureaucrats.
ObamaCare has soared off on its own, completely unrestrained by the Constitution, logic, or common sense. The young are to support he elderly, non-Muslims are to support Muslims, and the Obama mantra of everyone having a fair shot, doing their fair share, and everybody playing by the same rules was just words, and thrown under the bus when not convenient — as is the norm for this administration.
Filed under: Economy, Education, History, News the Media Doesn't Want You to Hear, Progressivism | Tags: "Racial Justice", How to Play the 'Race Card', Securing the Minority Vote
House Democrats received formal training this last week in how to address the issue of race to defend government programs. Race has long been the number one issue for Democrats. Way back in 1998, the left-leaning New World Foundation commissioned a survey by Zogby International that asked 1,800 rank-and-file members of nine progressive groups what it was that could galvanize them, what a progressive agenda should look like. They wanted to unite progressive groups in a coherent base and win elections. The results of the poll were reported in The Nation magazine.
Respondents ranked Racism as the country’s single most important social problem, followed by poverty, corporate power, jobs/economy, environment, moral decline and education.
The prominence of racism as an issue for Democrats is understandable. They have a long and abysmal record on race to overcome, and they count on government programs for the poor to bind the black and minority vote to the Democrat party. House Democrats fear that the minority vote is slipping away.
Maya Wiley of the Center for Social Inclusion told the House Democratic Caucus and staff that “conservative messages are racially ‘coded’ and had images of people of color that we commonly see used” and proposed tactics for countering the Republicans (presumably) racially-coded rhetoric. “Right-wing rhetoric.” according to Wiley’s group website.”has dominated debates of racial justice —undermining efforts to create a more equal society, and tearing apart the social safety net in the process” for over 25 years.
As examples of race-coded rhetoric, Wiley reminded the Democrats of Newt Gingrich’s famous comment about President Obama. “Calling a black man ‘the food stamp president” is not a race-neutral statement, even if Newt Gingrich did not intend racism.”
The website of the Center for Social Inclusion includes the following statement:
The right has a strategy to turn us away from racial justice. They claim that racial justice means blinding ourselves to race. They attack programs that right the wrongs of racism or help people of color by calling those very programs racist. Sometimes they pretend that they are not talking about race when they are. Sometimes they use stereotypical images of people of color to suggest that we shouldn’t support policies, implying that “these” people would benefit, without coming out and saying that. The right has been effective in keeping those who want reforms on the defensive, constantly in the position of justifying existing policies rather than advancing new ones that would further our goals. The conservative movement has delayed and rolled back our progress toward a fair and just society under the mantle of a “colorblind” American ideal.
Ms. Wiley and the Center she founded depend on racial justice issues for their livelihood. Preferring government handouts to good jobs, seems an odd definition of “social justice,” but the center’s website also declares their opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline, claiming that those jobs are only temporary, (some are, but many are permanent) and we don’t need the oil because solar energy and wind energy provide a cleaner future.
The Democrat Party depends on notions of “racial justice” — and accusations of racism will not go away. They make a lot of money on racism, and they will keep it alive. They have a long history to overcome.
Filed under: Conservatism, Election 2012, Humor, Liberalism, Politics, Progressivism | Tags: campaign ad, Death Star, Obama
Making Obama campaign ads. (My previous attempt here). If you like them, take them, share them, tweet them — spread them to the four corners of the universe.
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Filed under: Economy, Progressivism, Capitalism, Statism, The United States | Tags: Federal Jobs Programs, Incompetent, Free the Private Sector
President Obama is worried about unemployment. He keeps bragging that his administration has created 4 million jobs in the last two years, numbers that are dwarfed by the 88,319,000 Americans who have given up looking, and given up hope.
A big part of the problem is that Obama believes that his administration created those jobs, and that jobs are actually created by government training programs. “There are no fewer than 49 federal job training programs administered by nine agencies that cost taxpayers some $14.5 billion in 2010. A General Accountability Office performance audit in 2011 looked at fiscal year 2009 and determined that ‘only 5 of the 47 programs have had impact studies that assess whether the program is responsible for improved employment outcomes,’”according to the Wall Street Journal.
Of the five programs studied, the positive effect “tended to be small, inconclusive, or restricted to short-term impacts.” A 2011 Department of Labor study found that the benefits of job training under one of the most extensive efforts, the 1998 Workforce Investment Act, “were small or nonexistent.”
GAO reports in the 1990s, in 2000 and in 2003 had similar conclusions, finding that multiple programs duplicated efforts, ran up costs and produced few benefits. The reports did little to stem mission creep.
From 2003 to 2009, Congress added three more programs and spending rose by $5 billion. Don’t laugh, but two more programs have been added since, though spending is down slightly because of the end of the 2009 stimulus.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) defines “Green Jobs” as 1. jobs in businesses that produce goods or provide services that benefit the environment or conserve natural resources or 2. jobs in which workers’ duties involve making their establishments production processes more environmentally friendly or use fewer natural resources.
So lawnmower salesmen and sprinkler salesmen would count as “green jobs,”nurserymen, city street sweepers, smoke jumpers, farmers, I’m not being creative enough here—the official definitions are so broad and nonspecific that almost anything could be included.
The BlueGreen Alliance is an advocacy group that combines labor unions and environmentalists — which received a $6 million job-training grant from the stimulus. In spite of having spent nearly $3 million so far, the Alliance has only placed 16 workers in jobs that lasted longer than six months. Why do they insist on government programs?
Free up the private sector, and see how job creation is properly and profitably done.
Filed under: Conservatism, Democrat Corruption, Humor, Media Bias, News, News the Media Doesn't Want You to Hear, Politics, Progressivism | Tags: Andrew Breitbart, Democrats, Liberal lies, Obama
According to the most recent Rasmussen poll, the issues Americans care most about are: the economy, health care, government corruption, taxes, energy, education, social security, immigration, national security, and the war in Afghanistan.
So what do Obama and the Democrat/Media complex have us talking about?
Free contraception for Harvard Law School students, government funding of abortions and a phony “War on Women”, ostensibly waged by Republicans for refusing to subsidize Democrats’ sex-lives. They’re talking about dog carriers, car-elevators, Ann Romney’s clothes, Julia’s American Dream of lifelong government-dependency, gay marriage, and now a Washington Post hit-piece essentially calling Romney a gay-basher. (A ridiculous story that’s already falling apart).
It’s only natural that Obama would try to distract; his presidency has been an abject failure. Those issues about which Americans care most are the very same issues where Obama’s policies have done the most harm.
Real unemployment is in the double-digits. Far from hope, Obama has delivered despair as millions upon millions of Americans have given up even looking for a job. The labor force participation rate is the lowest it’s been in 30 years. As anyone who goes to the supermarket can tell you, real inflation is much higher than what the government is reporting. And that’s just grazing the surface of the first issue. I could write volumes about the failures and corruption of Obama and his administration, but you know them as well as I.
And while predictable, it’s no less unconscionably corrupt that the media would so blatantly run interference for the administration — indeed, seeming to take their plays directly from the Obama campaign.
That’s where we come in. Something new is happening. Taking their cue from the fearless champion of the underdog, Andrew Breitbart, citizens and (some) politicians alike are standing up to the Democrat/Media Complex and calling bullshit! We saw it in the debates, when the audience had had it with trivial distractions, and started booing the media moderators. Newt, and then other candidates, latched on to this and began — hallelujah — rejecting the moderator’s false premises and calling out their partisan tactics.
And so it goes, today, as I rattle this off, conservatives across blogs and social media are calling bullshit. We aren’t going to allow the media’s in-kind contributions to the Obama campaign, the interference, the activism. We’ll make them the story. We’ll call them out, publicly mock, ridicule and eviscerate them for their hackery, and destroy what little credibility, and audience, they have left. And we’ll ridicule the Obama campaign for even attempting to fool us twice.
It was in this spirit that I whipped up the new Obama campaign slogan above. I think it hits the nail right on the head. If you agree, please take it, like it, post it, spread it far and wide. Mockery is a very effective tool — one of Saul Alinsky’s favorites. And it warms the cockles of my cold, dead, conservative heart to use the left’s own tactics against them.
#WAR!
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Filed under: Capitalism, Democrat Corruption, Economy, Energy, Junk Science, National Security, Progressivism | Tags: "Beyond Gas", Radical Environmental Organizations, The Sierra Club
You are familiar with the Sierra Club, aren’t you? They have those lovely books and calendars with famed photographer Ansel Adams pictures of Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada Mountains. All the bookstores have them. The Sierra Club was founded as an environmental organization devoted to protecting Yosemite, the Sierras and the Redwoods. Did you know that it has become one of the most radical environmental organizations in the world?
They have just declared war on the natural-gas industry. The Sierra Club already has their “Beyond Coal” campaign, and “Beyond Oil,” and they are renaming their efforts against natural gas as “Beyond Gas”. Clever.
Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said “As we push to retire coal plants, we’re going to work to make sure we’re not simultaneously switching to natural-gas infrastructure. And we’re going to be preventing new gas plants from being built wherever we can.
Perhaps you have read about the new discoveries of massive supplies of energy found in shale deposits, and thought gratefully about the possibility that your energy bills would go down. Not so fast. The environmental organizations and the Left want the country to depend on “clean energy,” which is, so far, embodied entirely in wind farms and solar arrays. It is hard to understand their motivation: they are zealots, they are dimwits, they are useful idiots?
•In 2011, the United States produced 23.0 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, making it the world’s largest natural gas producer.• In 2011 the U.S. produced 5.67 million barrels of oil, making it the world’s third largest oil producer. •The U.S. has 261 billion tons of coal in its proved coal reserves. •These are the world’s largest coal reserves and over 27 percent of the world’s proved coal reserves. •Proved conventional oil reserves worldwide more than doubled from 642 billion barrels in 1980 to more than 1.3 trillion barrels in 2009. •The U.S. has 486 billion tons of coal in its demonstrated reserve base, enough domestic coal to use for the next 485 years at current rates of consumption. •This doesn’t include Alaska’s coal resources, which according to government estimates, are larger than those in the lower 48 states. • The world could hold more than 700 quadrillion (700,000 trillion ) cubic feet of methane hydrates — more energy than all other fossil fuels.
♦In 2011, wind power produced 1.2 percent of the energy used in the United States. ♦ In 2011, solar power produced 0.1 percent of the energy used in the United States. ♦ In 2011, hydroelectric power contributed 3.3 percent of the energy used in the United States and 7.9 percent of the electricity. ♦ There are 104 nuclear reactors in the U.S. and construction for all began prior to 1974.
Since 1970, the six “criteria pollutants” have declined by 63 percent, even though the generation of electricity from coal-fired plants has increased by over 180 percent.
The subsidies for wind energy are running out as they were part of Obama’s stimulus plan. If they are not renewed, the wind industry probably cannot survive on its own without governmental force. Aside from all the scandal and crony capitalism in the “renewables” field, wind and solar combined cannot produce the energy we need to keep warm in the winter and cool in the summer. People die from the cold. Germany now has 15% fuel poverty — people cannot pay for the energy they need. Britain has had huge problems with fuel poverty— it wasn’t long ago that British seniors were buying up used books at jumble sales to burn for fuel. And the earth is cooling instead of warming.
The zealots apparently believe that if they just give enough money to their well-connected friends who are involved with “renewable energy” that the industry will somehow take off. If they just ban enough of our cheap, abundant resources, then people will be forced to use “renewable energy,” and if they switch us all to electric cars — oh wait, the electricity for our electric cars is produced by coal-fired or gas-fired plants. Well, they’ll force us all onto light rail and high-speed trains — oh wait… You will notice if you are paying close attention that the term “renewable energy” has dropped from favor, and been replaced by “clean energy”— the “renewable” bit only worked when we were running out of fossil fuels. Now that they are truly plentiful, they have to come up with another tactic. Just imagine if we eliminated coal and eliminated natural gas! Basic, elementary common sense and logic fail. Besides that, remember than wind and solar require 24/7 backup from regular coal or gas-fired power plants. How is this possibly supposed to work? Are they zealots, dimwits or useful idiots?
