Larry Elder over at RealClearPolitics writes a very nice little article retrospective of when gas prices rose under Bush, and how they are now under Obama. In his article, he mentions some comments made by Nancy Pelosi. I had tackled that one before. Just for the record, when she made the comments criticizing Bush and promising her “commonsense plan to help bring down skyrocketing gas prices by cracking down on price gouging, rolling back the billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies, tax breaks and royalty relief given to big oil and gas companies, and increasing production of alternative fuels”, gas is STILL 20% more than when she made her promise. And you know what, it’s on a path to get much, much, worse:
| Commodity | April-06 | January-11 | |
| Corn | $250 | $624 | 150% |
| Soybean | $590 | $1,374 | 133% |
| Wheat | $400 | $794 | 99% |
| Gas | $58 | $93 | 60% |
Normally I discuss gas prices and supply in my science blog. However, this issue is 100% political. There is now more supply than there was in 2006, but the price is higher purely because of liberal political philosophies limiting our ability to get it. If it were actually accomplishing something good, I would grin and bear it. As it is, with the deforestation in South America and the declining US economy, which does more good for the planet than anything else does, this is not something good.
See if these two maps seem to have a running theme. First, Map 1. No titles, no labels, just ten pins:
If that doesn’t seem clear enough, try this one:
That is the ten richest counties in the USA according to the 2010 census. What do you think the odds are that five of them would be within 30 miles of Washington, DC. A city built on a swamp with no natural resources.
Now, let’s look at another map, shall we?
I’m gonna bet a bunch of people will know what this list is simply by the locations. South Carolina, Mississippi, and eastern Kentucky. For those that don’t get it real quick and easy, we’ll all sit back and let you figure it out.
Got it? If not, they are the ten poorest counties according to the 2010 census. Now, unlike Washington, DC, some of these areas are rich in resources. But, for various reasons, have not thrived. The top three in fact sit on some of the largest coal reserves on the planet. Over-regulation and political fear-mongering in the 60′s and 70′s killed the industry that was lifting these areas out of the poverty. It was done by people, drum roll please, who lived in the first map. So how do you suppose people living in the first map made all that money? They’re not doing it by mining coal. They’re doing it to a huge degree there off of taxpayer’s backs. What little money’s being made in Lee County, KY is being taxed and sent to DC so people can live nicely in Fairfax, VA.
And God forbid any man think about flipping it around occasionally. The mere suggestion of spending any federal money in the poorest of the poor counties in the US automatically gets labeled as pork by any organization that feels they have the authority to call it what they want. There’s all kinds of organizations that feel justified in persecuting anyone that feels like spending money where people need it most. They don’t care at all that if a geographic area has nothing to immediately attach federal spending to, the only way they can get any money is by what they define to be pork. In their perfect world scenario, the people of Fairfax, VA would simply get all the federal money and the rest of the country would have to fend for itself as well as chip in to cover it. Think I’m making this stuff up? Where do you suppose Citizens for Government Waste has their offices?
1301 PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE, NW, SUITE 1075, WASHINGTON, DC 20004
Right smack in the middle of the dots in the first map. Their favorite target? The guy who represents four of the dots on the last map. Coincidence?
I know as well as anyone that some of the “pork” is waste. But, I also know that there are no other means to target specific problem areas economically. If a Congressman attempts to use federal dollars to stimulate economic development, it’s immediately lumped into the same category as “pork” even if it’s a well thought out program that can generate economic benefits. The problem has never been pork. Ever. The problem has been wasteful spending. Follow me for just one second with this. CAGW and a whole long list of people target a particular type of spending. What they never do, ever, is look at ingrained wasteful spending. 20,000 health and human service jobs around Fairfax, VA is a hell of a lot more wasteful than building one multi-functional building in Somerset, KY. Has CAGW ever concerned themselves with that? No. Because there is no established mechanism in rural Kentucky for wasting huge amounts of money, it HAS to be pork. If they want to do it around Fairfax, VA, they just hire another 1,000 government employees and Citizens Against Government Waste and Anderson Cooper are perfectly happy with it.
Barney Frank justifies a harsh estate tax because, for no other reason, the people inheriting the money did nothing to earn it.
For starters, Barney Frank should be the last person in this country to be encouraging broad judgments and persecutory laws against people who are in a situation not of their own choice. The very fact that all of these estate taxes penalize people who have already paid taxes on those assets makes it purely a persecutory law targeting a section of the population for no logically justifiable reason. The law does not penalize those “who did nothing to earn it”, as Barney asserts, it penalizes those who did earn it. Barney just assumes it’s dead-beat kids. It could be the business partner, life partner, kids, or even the charity the person who DID earn it chose to leave it to. More importantly to me, the person who DID earn it has already paid taxes on it. When it was income, they paid once. If it’s assets, they have paid every year since they had that asset. When they die, this tax lowers the value of their estate. The “person who did nothing to earn it” is not expected to pay anything on their own assets. They are expected to pay a percentage of what they were to receive. So, this is not a tax on them. It is purely, and 100%, a tax on the person that died. Barney’s not arguing the facts of this legislation. He wants you to blindly believe his rhetoric that certain people need to be taxed because of nothing more than who they associated with.
For starters, get yourself in a situation like this:
Okay, what we got here is a man staring down a school board. He’s not going down in a blaze of glory, he’s pointing a pistol at six completely unarmed, middle aged, administrators. They don’t make movies about that. It’s just too boring. Now, the video has more detail, but I don’t usually care to see that much. He then does battle with a woman and her purse. He wins. He then points his pistol point blank at six people sitting calmly directly in front of him and misses all of them. The security guard finally shoots him, wounding him enough to convince him to shoot himself.
Just a memo to those out there wanting to re-create such thrilling exits: don’t do it. Okay? I mean really, don’t do it. This guy has assured himself a special place in idiot hell.
First of all, don’t shoot up school board meetings, they are special kind of boring that renders all the rest of the potential drama moot. The members that are life-long educators have a special ability to lull antagonists to sleep. Given another five minutes, Mr. Duke would never have been able to pull the trigger. Secondly, don’t use little tiny pistols. After it was over several people who were shot at, still thought it was a toy or fake bullets. Even if he had hit someone, it would have taken a little extra luck for the bullet to have done the job. They just don’t do a whole lot of physical damage when they’re that small.
Especially don’t do something like this:
He scribbled a big V with a red circle before he made his statement. That’s the V for Vendetta. Get it? He’s on a vendetta against school boards.
Only problem, there’s no school boards in V for Vendetta. There’s a totalitarian government, but school boards aren’t governments. In other words, his fight’s just not quite on the grand scale as the movie.
For all those wanna-be’s out there, just go out in the back yard and do it and leave some bizarre rambling note about the injustices of school boards. Publicly embarrassing yourself doesn’t do your cause any good at all.
14
Dec
I had this to say a while back:
Fair warning here folks, the next couple of years will suck if you’re an independent business owner
That was in reference to Ted Kennedy wanting to raise the minumum wage because Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats took over Washington. He got what he wanted. Unemployment increased more than 100% since that point. Obama has tossed trillions at the problem. We’ve had TARP, the bailouts, fights over taxes, fights over earmarks, everything you can imagine. But so far I’ve not seen one single person suggest we undo the single event that seemed to instigate the entire fiasco that SOME people knew would cause all this to happen. Make it cheaper to hire people and the jobs will come.
