A free-market solution to health care. Of course, it doesn’t pass the litmus test of socializing medicine, so it will be a non-starter with this administration.
Category Archives: Business
Statists, Meet Petard
Northern Virginia and the other DC suburbs are going to be hit hard by the Obama tax plan. I’m guessing that these are areas that went overwhelmingly for The One, to give him his overall Virginia victory. Here’s a good example of Mencken’s dictum that democracy would give the people what they want, and ensure that they get it good and hard. And this points out the economic mindlessness and absurdity of picking an arbitrary income level to start punishing achievement:
Besides raising tax rates in 2011 on the highest income brackets, this year’s budget would lower the deductions families earning $250,000 can make from their income.
“In my district, we have a high household income, but I would say two things about that,” Himes said. “No. 1, there’s huge diversity in my district. It includes some of the poorest families in the country and some of the wealthiest.
“And second, income has to be held against expenses. We have one of the highest costs of living in the country as well, which is problematic for all sorts of things,” Himes said.
The median sales price for a home in Greenwich, according to the real estate website Trulia, is $735,000, but that’s down significantly. Bloomberg reported in February that home sales in Greenwich, where the nation’s hedge fund industry generally lives, plunged 84 percent in January 2009 compared to a year earlier.
It’s still cheaper to buy a home in Fargo, where the average listing price is $192,436, according to Trulia. It’s also safe to say that wages are a little lower in the Red River Valley.
There is a reason that federalism is a good idea. Like a national “minimum wage,” to the degree that such a thing should exist at all, it’s ridiculous to apply a one-size fits all to the entire country. Both tax rates and wage and price controls should be left to the states, not Washington. But hey, they wanted “change.” Don’t come crying to me.
The Case For Bankruptcy
Mickey Kaus says that it’s time for GM to bow to the inevitable. I agree — bankruptcy wouldn’t make things any worse, and could improve many things (including not having to bail it out with taxpayers’ funds any more). As a member of a GM family, I don’t say that with any cheer, but at some point, reality must be accepted.
[Update in the afternoon]
Here’s one more reason for GM to throw in the towel. The “Cap and Trade” in the budget bill will kill the industry, and Michigan.
Making War On Prosperity
A lot of discussion of the impact of the president’s plan to punish anyone making over a quarter of a million bucks. What is particularly disgusting is all of his lies and rhetoric about the free market providing jobs, and the importance of small business and entrepreneurs. Watch what he does, not what he says.
[Update in the evening]
Carl Pham in comments suggests a variation on Martin Niemuller’s famous quote: “First they came for those making $250,000, and I said nothing, because I didn’t make that much…”
[Update a little while later]
If you work less to avoid taxes, are you a tax dodger?
I think it’s worse (or will be worse) than that. You’re an enemy of the state.
[Update a few minutes later]
It’s certainly a theory that fits the facts.
[Update at 7 PM Eastern]
Going John Galt.
Market Advice
From Barack Obama. Frankly, he’s about the last person that I’d take market advice from. I wonder if he owns any stocks himself?
Financing Space Entrepreneurs
Eva-Jane Lark has an interview with the interestingly named (what is he, Swiss?) Guillermo Söhnlein, on the progress with the Space Angel’s Network. I hope that he and some of his fellow angels will be at Space Access.
[Via Parabolic Arc]
Is It Ayn’s Tea Party?
Paul Hsieh thinks that it should be. I have to agree with the commenter, though, who thinks that Hayek is a better bet.
Take Your Tea And Shove It
Economy stimulator extraordinaire Iowahawk tells the American Tea Party what to do with their bags:
Thanks to the new federal mortgage bailout bill, Americans like me are finally on track for housing security. Previously facing a $1.2 million debt from three mortgage on a home recently appraised at $43,500, less missing bathroom fixtures and windows, the President’s plan allowed me to renegotiate my payments down to a level that will keep me solvent until at least mid June-ish. Now that my family and various friends from Jimbo’s Tap Room no longer have to worry about having a stable crash pad, we are finally free to resume the spending that will lead America back to economic prosperity.
I wish I could take credit for it, but it took the collective effort of hundreds of thousands of us in the subprime community, working with the financial industry and public sector officials. Unfortunately, there is another group out there who is working to kill important financial bailout reforms just as they are sparking a renaissance in the American housing market. I’m speaking, of course, of the so-called “Tea Party” tax protesters.
I’m sure you’ve heard of them or read their emails: “Wah, I paid my mortgage.” “Wah, I didn’t use my house for an ATM.” “Wah, Dave I need that hundred back I lent you at Christmas.” Now, I’m as sympathetic to a good sob story as anybody, but these whiners have nobody to blame but themselves for their predicament. Anyone who kept track of the Gallup presidential polls last year should have known what was coming, so don’t blame me if you decided to waste your money paying your stupid mortgage. But, in the six-dimensional bizarro world of these noisy tax gripes, they expect me to give up my bailout to pay for their irresponsible lack of foresight! Helloooo?! Beam me up, Scotty!
Some people are just ingrates.
Ahhhhnuullld The Democrat
I’m listening to the evening news on my last night in LA, after the announcement that the state unemployment is in double digits, hearing the RINO Governator talking about how “creating jobs is his highest priority.”
Well, ignoring the issue of “creating jobs” (which can be done by simply handing out money stolen from the taxpayers or borrowed from future taxpayers to pay people to do various things of various and dubious value, often negative) as opposed to creating wealth and not making war on prosperity, here’s an idea, Arnie.
How about doing an analysis of previous California policy to figure out why the jobs were destroyed, and stop doing and start undoing those things? Or is that too hard?
That’s Not The John Maynard Keynes That I Knew
Apparently, President Obama and the Congressional Democrats have thrown Keynes under the bus, too, even though they don’t realize it:
…it is true that government direction of capital is something Keynes advocated. But the current direction of capital by government is being conducted in a manner that flies in the face of Keynes’s underlying justifications for such state involvement.
For example, the stimulation of investment has thus far been ad hoc. The Treasury and Federal Reserve have infused capital into some firms but not others. In the case of financial firms, the rationales have been to promote liquidity or prevent insolvency or both. The government has moved on to direct capital into the troubled automobile industry. The Federal Reserve and the Treasury are buying mortgage-backed securities, thereby making more credit available to the housing industry. The construction trades are expecting a huge infusion of capital under the rubric of “infrastructure” spending. And now an enormous list of other industries has been approved for temporary stimulation by the Obama administration.
It is difficult to imagine that Keynes would be enthusiastic about these temporary and discretionary policies given his diagnosis of the fundamental problem.
The historical record is helpful here. Keynes opposed immediate, short-term stimulus in 1937 when the British unemployment rate was 11 percent—much higher than we are experiencing today. Furthermore, he opposed temporary reductions in the short-term rates of interest because he believed that variability of interest rates sent the wrong long-term message. As he argued in “How to Avoid a Slump,” an article in the Times of London newspaper, “A low enough long-term rate of interest cannot be achieved if we allow it to be believed that better terms will be obtainable from time to time by those who keep their resources liquid.”
Of course, most of these people are far too economically illiterate to even understand Keynes. Instead, they simply adulate him as a god and use him as an excuse to do what they want to do anyway, regardless of whether or not it’s truly Keynesian.
[Update early evening]
More historical ignorance: Barack Obama versus Henry David Thoreau. Now, Thoreau was actually sort of a loon, and his “wisdom” is highly overrated, as P. J. O’Rourke has amusingly pointed out in the past, but the notion that the small-government philosopher would have approved of the “stimulus” plan is ludicrous.