I have always loved this song but I was extra thrilled to hear this rendition.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Monday, December 14, 2009
My Climate Change Plan
You know how we are always talking about how Washington is broken and how they are all just blowing hot air? Well, I think we need to stem the flow of emissions from our federal legislators so here is My Climate Change Plan: I think we should cut government staffs, salaries, funding and government programs to pre 1900 levels. I think we should limit the house and the senate to 12 pieces of single subject legislation, less than 50 pages in length, per year. I think there should be single term limits and only one term per lifetime per legislative body per individual.
Considering advances in technology and efficiency I think it's not only possible I think it would be successful! Think about what would happen if representatives and senators actually read and understood the legislation in front of them and had to debate the constitutionality of each point of each new piece of legislation! What would happen if no one had to worry about being re-elected! What if being constitutionally correct trumped partisan cooperation and compromise in the name of 'getting things done.'
And think of all the jobs and opportunities that would open up for the free market to fill; Think of all the tax revenues we would be leaving in the free market to be reinvested in capital improvement and in new jobs; Think about a financial system without the federal reserve...glorious!
Considering advances in technology and efficiency I think it's not only possible I think it would be successful! Think about what would happen if representatives and senators actually read and understood the legislation in front of them and had to debate the constitutionality of each point of each new piece of legislation! What would happen if no one had to worry about being re-elected! What if being constitutionally correct trumped partisan cooperation and compromise in the name of 'getting things done.'
And think of all the jobs and opportunities that would open up for the free market to fill; Think of all the tax revenues we would be leaving in the free market to be reinvested in capital improvement and in new jobs; Think about a financial system without the federal reserve...glorious!
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Food Stamps and the welfare state
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/us/29foodstamps.html
This is particularly disturbing. The authors focus on the exception in the food stamp program...the married, working, middle class. This may be a new demographic but the vast majority of recipients do not fit this mold and honestly the majority of recipients are the reason for the stigma the food stamp program has carried for many years...Mr. Dawson's comment about the lazy, unworking, unmarried, poor is all too true. Food stamps may have once been an assistance program but it is not now...it is rightly called an entitlement program and is well represented by the tale of the ant and the grasshopper. The problem is that if the ants defect to the grasshopper's way of subsistence there will come a time that resources cannot be shared because of scarcity and people will die. The government (the grasshopper) has for the last eleven decades slowly adopted the same mind set slowly and inexorably consuming more than we (the ants) produce and taking more and more from the people to feed progressively larger expenditures that do not return resources to the producers. There is a point in the future when this trend will either have to be reversed or the system will collapse.
If we look to history for a precedent the great depression is a great example of the model we are now playing out. Unemployment and dept are skyrocketing and the dollar is near collapse, all because of failed regulation and rapidly expanding government programs and primarily because of the defection of an ever increasing minority of ants to the way of the grasshopper; resources are becoming stretched because there is less being produced than is being consumed and values of real goods are decreasing because there is no demand as driven by inflation which ties back to regulation. In the 1990's during the retraction of entitlement programs there was contraction of the national deficit in correlation to this retraction. This was driven by congress, not President Clinton, who later promoted the expansion of the food stamp and welfare programs that reversed the earlier retraction and once again expanded the national deficit. During the 1940's and 50's there was an unprecedented expansion of entrepreneurship, manufacturing and production, and an accompanying expansion of wealth in the middle class that established an enormous reservoir of capital upon which the nation financed tremendous expansions of the national infrastructure and the federal government.
This is particularly disturbing. The authors focus on the exception in the food stamp program...the married, working, middle class. This may be a new demographic but the vast majority of recipients do not fit this mold and honestly the majority of recipients are the reason for the stigma the food stamp program has carried for many years...Mr. Dawson's comment about the lazy, unworking, unmarried, poor is all too true. Food stamps may have once been an assistance program but it is not now...it is rightly called an entitlement program and is well represented by the tale of the ant and the grasshopper. The problem is that if the ants defect to the grasshopper's way of subsistence there will come a time that resources cannot be shared because of scarcity and people will die. The government (the grasshopper) has for the last eleven decades slowly adopted the same mind set slowly and inexorably consuming more than we (the ants) produce and taking more and more from the people to feed progressively larger expenditures that do not return resources to the producers. There is a point in the future when this trend will either have to be reversed or the system will collapse.
If we look to history for a precedent the great depression is a great example of the model we are now playing out. Unemployment and dept are skyrocketing and the dollar is near collapse, all because of failed regulation and rapidly expanding government programs and primarily because of the defection of an ever increasing minority of ants to the way of the grasshopper; resources are becoming stretched because there is less being produced than is being consumed and values of real goods are decreasing because there is no demand as driven by inflation which ties back to regulation. In the 1990's during the retraction of entitlement programs there was contraction of the national deficit in correlation to this retraction. This was driven by congress, not President Clinton, who later promoted the expansion of the food stamp and welfare programs that reversed the earlier retraction and once again expanded the national deficit. During the 1940's and 50's there was an unprecedented expansion of entrepreneurship, manufacturing and production, and an accompanying expansion of wealth in the middle class that established an enormous reservoir of capital upon which the nation financed tremendous expansions of the national infrastructure and the federal government.
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