Read what Goldstein has to say because he’s right.

Yes, mining is a dangerous profession, particularly for folks working underground. And, certainly, mining is a dirty profession, again, especially if you work underground.

Add to that, though, that mining is a well-paying job that often requires technical knowledgge and good training, and for folks in mining communities those jobs are often much better options than anything else that they’ll find in the area.  For mining engineers--like folks who go to schools like the Colorado School of Mines--the potential paycheck is mighty good. The popular view of mining might be a bunch of grimy faces marching underground with picks and hardhats, but the reality is much more complex.

So, again, let me say, these are good paying jobs. Indeed, these are good jobs--worthy work that helps America’s economy motor along and, because of mine worker advocates, far a job done far safer here than in much of the world. These are good jobs.

The current administration has already made decisions that have killed job growth in the mining industry, but now there is fear that we could see a loss of jobs.

Two miles deep in their latest tunnel, coal miner Steve Baker and his cohorts barely blink at underground hazards: a cavern collapsing behind them, explosive gas around their boots, roiling clouds of black dust.
But they dread the above-ground parrying of state and federal politicians over protection of the nation’s forests. Decisions expected soon by Gov. Bill Ritter and the Obama administration may threaten the miners’ livelihoods — and the future of a traditional industry in western Colorado.
Once, the miners relied on bore holes drilled from the forest above to vent the explosive methane. Today, new holes are prohibited — because holes require temporary roads through forests where roads have been banned.

Now, access to half their coal reserves is hung up, jeopardizing 1,000 jobs in this valley and survival of a half-dozen towns.

There is room for talking about environmental effects, safety, and the value of the different kinds of mining in the United States, but never forget that decisions made by the sophisticates in Washington DC have real world effects on families in communities that are probably very different from those that you or I live in. Johanna Maurice put it well in an article about her the effect that DC decision-makers were having on her home state:

West Virginia’s policymakers know the people who live up the road, know how they make a living, know what they can’t afford, know the problems local governments face, know what the loss of an employer would mean, know why some West Virginia workers have “Cadillac” health plans . . . .

In short, state policymakers know a thousand times more than distant, ill-informed - frankly, uncaring - bureaucrats in Washington would even think to ask.

The policymakers who are closest to us are vastly more likely to produce nuanced policies West Virginians can live with.

Absolutely right, which helps explain why Colorado democrats tend to skew surprisingly conservative in some areas.

If you really want to see job “creation” from DC, don’t look to see where the government is spending all that borrowed money; look to see where government is getting out of the way of people doing business. 

Ray Charles sings one of my favorite versions of “Little Drummer Boy"--complete with slide guitar, brass, and a really great vibe.

None of which explains why our friends in Britain are imposing a 50% special tax on bankers’ bonuses. What irritates most about this (and do read the comments at the linked article) is the raw popularity of this kind of move. Class warfare like this is neither good business (in trying to punish these people, it fairly encourages work-arounds to maintain the pay schedule and avoid the extra taxes--achieving precisely neither of the stated goals) nor is it good ethics (it is not simply unfair, but injurious that a person face confiscatory and capricious taxes of this nature simply because of his or her chosen field).

The British government on Wednesday said banks would pay a one-time, 50% tax on bonuses worth more than 25,000 pounds ($40,700) in an effort to encourage banks to rebuild their capital bases and continue lending to individuals and businesses.

David Wessel reports on results from a panel dissussion on international regulation, along with Sir Andrew Crockett, Dame Clara Furse and Fichard Gnodde at the Future of Finance conference.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling delivered the blow in his annual pre-budget report, which also laid out the government’s plans to cut the deficit over the next four years.

Darling said he was giving banks, which have all benefited directly or indirectly from massive government aid, a choice.

“They can use their profits to build up their capital base. But if they insist on paying substantial rewards, I am determined to claw money back for the taxpayer,” he said.

You won’t see too many people crying for those bankers; the portrait of the banker is the fat cat who profits on the labors of the little people, so who cares about them? The principle is worth supporting, though: no citizen should live in fear of an arbitrary tax being levied against them because they chose the wrong job.

What do I know, though? I’m just some marketing guy who trusts that the government won’t come along and crush me with new taxes, regulations, and fees for such whimsical reasons. Which might just be another way of saying “sucker.”

For all the talk about making health care a “right” for all Americans (or, at least, everyone who happens to be sick, injured, diseased, or otherwise needy in a health care sort of way), it sure sounds potentially hazardous to fail to exercise your right in just the right way. If you take my meaning.

Prosecution is authorized under the Code for a variety of offenses.  Depending on the level of the noncompliance, the following penalties could apply to an individual:

• Section 7203 – misdemeanor willful failure to pay is punishable by a fine of up to $25,000 and/or imprisonment of up to one year.

• Section 7201 – felony willful evasion is punishable by a fine of up to $250,000 and/or imprisonment of up to five years.”

I know that there are readers of this blog (and friends of mine) who are big supporters of the Democrat’s health care reform proposals, but the more I read about it the more disturbed I am. Good intentions don’t make good policy; what the Democrats are trying to pass right now might be with the best intentions, but I’m terrified that it will hurt our already bleeding economy.

If it does manage to pass, though, I’ll have an easy guide to who to vote against in the upcoming elections.

Read the rest.

Firstly, Mr. President, you argue in bad faith. When you assert that I and my fellow Republicans oppose health care reform because we want to score cheap political points, you are wrong. We oppose bad reform because we disagree with you over the proposed solutions. Most Republicans, and most Americans, want reforms, but we disagree wildly on what the best fixes should be.

Either you misunderstand our disagreement or you are intentionally miscasting it for, well, your own cheap political points.

With the country sinking in a hole of debt, I think this is a wonderful time to be skeptical of big, new government programs. While you, again, try to score cheap political points by tying the last administration as the bad guy whenever the debt question comes up, there are two things to realize: most of us understand that President Bush definitely helped the budget problems along, but most of us also understand the role that your administration has had in compounding the problems.

We don’t trust you with our money.

While we do our best to convey our opposition to things like the public option, you do your best to minimize our concerns by telling us to stop bickering. Let me explain something: voices are being raised because a sizable portion of the population is pretty sure you stopped listening. Instead, we are being told, in so many words, to “get out of the way.” With all due respect, Mr. President, I’m not much in the mood to get out of the way.

We don’t trust you to hear our voices.

The issue is compounded whenever I hear you talk about calling people out for spreading misinformation. While standing up and heckling isn’t much my style (at least, not outside my own home), I sympathize mightily with the sentiment because it seems that you are the one trying to mislead us.

When you tell us you’ll listen to constructive criticism and look at alternative plans, we know you aren’t telling the truth because you’ve continue to work to minimize our voices. When you tell us that you won’t sign onto a plan that will raise the deficit, we don’t believe you because it’s just another empty campaign promise, really, and the follow up that you’ll promise to make cuts to balance out new expenses if you prove to be wrong is simply laughable. Actually, it would be laughable coming from nearly any politician this side of Ron Paul, but from you it’s downright hilarious.

We don’t trust you to tell us the truth.

The left is absolutely right about one thing: Americans do want health care reform. That doesn’t we want the reform that they are selling, though, and it doesn’t mean that we have to sit down and shut up just because we are the minority party. To paraphrase one Van Jones, some of us have to get a little uppity.

Saddling the country with new debt and new regulations before we’ve even emerged from this recession is suicidal, and I don’t believe that he can achieve what he wants to achieve without adding new debt. Regardless of the feel good factor--and, yes, it would be lovely if we could live in a world where all the medicine and health care you needed was cheap and abundant and there weren’t any lines to get the good stuff--the reality is that government programs pretty much always cost more and do less than they were intended. If you want efficiency, then get government out of the way; if you want bureaucracy, long lines, confused consumers, and legislation that makes it harder to run your business, then, yes, more government is the answer for you.

You can keep pushing for this, Mr. President, but we will push back. We won’t be intimidated by union thugs or talk of “punching back twice as hard.” We won’t be shamed into submission for opposing legislation that would be harmful to the economy or to our health care system. And we don’t apologize for offering up our own solutions.

And let it be known: if it comes to a vote and the reform package is wrong, we damn well won’t vote for anyone, be they Republican or Democrat, who votes for that package. For a lot of us, this is the line.

Some other voices:
Bob Hayes on health care co-ops.
Doesn’t seem that De Doc trusts our government overly much, either (although this post is from a few weeks back).
A political cartoon on Protein Wisdom captures my thoughts nicely.
Thoughts from Rove via Sama. (And, as an aside, Sama is using Feed a Fever as his RSS Reader. Which is fun to say out loud.)
Roger Fraley has some thoughts.
Distributed Republic is, ahem, skeptical.
And then there’s the football-shaped, stuffed french toast issue. Which might have nothing to do with health care today, but give it a few years to harden some arteries.

Want to return to growth? Then stop this President and his Congress.

Speak truth to power, brother Vodka.

The post-election talk of a permanent Democratic majority is looking a little funny now--and, whenever I run across a true believer spouting the same kind of talk over the last few weeks in blogs and message boards, it’s downright hilarious. While the American public staged a painful spanking of the GOP, that doesn’t mean it isn’t noticing the bullying, hypocrisy, and overreach by an increasingly out-of-touch and belligerent Democratic majority. While we’re still a long way out from the actual voting, it would be pretty surprising if the right doesn’t take a big chunk out of that supposedly unassailable Democratic majority. Enough, in fact, that they might be able to function as a strong opposition party--a feat that they would be utterly incapable of right now if it weren’t for the left’s incompetence, increasing public outrage over government spending and the handling of some of President Obama’s signature policy issues (specifically, health care and cap-and-trade), and the blue dog Democrats who have made it possible for the Republican’s paltry numbers to be meaningful in this debate.

The GOP should be thanking Joe and Jane Public for taking interest in the political process this year and rank-and-file Democrats for treating Joe and Jane as if they were un-patriotic buffoons for daring to question their policy dictates.

Politically, for the left, the health care debate really is starting to look like political suicide.

It’s the highest stakes ever for a Nevada election, and former boxer Sen. Harry Reid is on the ropes early. Either Republican Danny Tarkanian or Sue Lowden would knock out Reid in a general election, according to a recent poll of Nevada voters.

The results suggest the Democratic Senate majority leader will have to punch hard and often in order to retain his position as the most accomplished politician in state history, in terms of job status.

Nevadans favored Tarkanian over Reid 49 percent to 38 percent and Lowden over Reid 45 percent to 40 percent, according to the poll.

As I’ve said before, though, if the GOP really wants to capitalize on this moment in a meaningful way, it needs to do more than sit back and watch the carnage. It needs to offer a meaningful and substantial alternative to the left’s excesses; it needs to be, again, a conservative party with principled conservative leadership that stands for something other than merely being better than the alternative (and not always even that).

For Democrats, it’s a tough situation. Any Democrat in a centrist or conservative state and any Democrat that won small in their last election probably wants some cover going into the mid-terms. They want the freedom to vote against unpopular legislation regardless of their own position on the subject. With health care, they aren’t getting that cover, and it may well be the defining issue going into the next elections.

It doesn’t help that the president is proving to be less popular and more divisive than many of his supporters expected. Staring down the muzzle of more than doubling the huge national debt over the next decade certainly isn’t helping his cause, but neither is the dismissive tone coming from the White House.

Before White House press secretary Robert Gibbs left town, he tried to clarify President Barack Obama’s comment that “everybody in Washington gets all wee-weed up.” Gibbs explained to reporters that what the president meant was that they were a bunch of bed wetters who made too much out of the implosion of the White House health care strategy.

Gibbs has grown more sardonic and patronizing as the summer wears on and Obama’s poll numbers wilt.

The press secretary has lectured reporters on the nature of their jobs — apparently to defend the administration against “misinformation” rather than asking impertinent questions like “How will you pay for it?”

Is the Obama presidency already in danger? Hardly. The Democrats still have numbers and the public still harbors some mistrust of the GOP. But every week that goes by sees the president further and further back on his heels and he is in danger of losing the health care debate--a loss that would probably define him as more politically weak than anyone could have guessed.

For me, this is a tough thing to watch. I had hoped that Obama would govern well--that he would be moderate and careful, that he would reach across the aisle and help give the country some common cause to rally behind. I didn’t vote for him, but I wanted him to succeed (which, in case you’re reading this wrong, meant that I wanted him to have the right policies, the right ideas, and the right kind of leadership for our times). I don’t like watching any president fail because that means that the country is in worse shape at the end of his tenure than it was beforehand.

I’m becoming increasingly worried that we’re going to experience a profoundly failed presidency and that the damage is going to stretch far into our country’s future.

It isn’t entirely finalized (the story is too specific for me to address it all here in public), but it looks like declining revenue is about to kill off one more job.

Mine, that is.

Somehow this, from the Denver Business Journal:

A forthcoming report by a research center at the University of Denver says Colorado’s state government faces a looming financial crisis, DU said Monday.

The report from the Center for Colorado’s Economic Future at DU is titled “Colorado’s State Budget Tsunami.” It is to be formally released Tuesday.

“There is simply not enough money to pay for the government we have created,” the report says. “Barring a quick and dramatic turnaround of the economy, it appears that the current fiscal system cannot be sustained.”

In announcing the report’s findings, DU noted that “anticipated fiscal demands for K-12 education, prisons and Medicaid will swamp today’s revenue-generating tax and fee system” in Colorado.

Doesn’t square so happily with this, from this morning’s Denver Post:

Thousands of low-income Coloradans reliant on public assistance could get a free cellphone under a plan before the state Public Utilities Commission.

If approved, the plan by TracFone Wireless in Miami would make Colorado the 17th state it has settled into with free cell service for the indigent, a form of wireless welfare that proponents say taps into one of the last untapped markets for the telecom technology.

Certainly, the money comes from different buckets. Our financial crisis is one based around a general fund that doesn’t quite pay for the soup of services, handouts, freebies, and bureaucracy that voters and lawmakers have built up in Colorado. The free phones will be paid for by fees that the rest of us non-free users pay on our existing phones. Which is to say, those of us who actually pay for the service subsidize those who do not.

My problem, then, is philosophical in nature: in this country we continue to push the bar higher and higher on what constitutes a right even against all evidence that we can’t actually pay for what we promise. No service is unlimited, no pot of money is bottomless, and good economic times don’t last forever.

With our nation bleeding red (and my state’s politicians, who know that they don’t have the votes to raise taxes, finding creative ways to raise fees on everything from getting married to milking cows) why are we finding ways to spend even more money on things that can hardly be defined as core functionality for our government?

And that report about Colorado’s economy? It’s hard to imagine that you couldn’t read our nation’s future in its words, too.

The problem is that our government is built to constantly grow, but it doesn’t have a mechanism for pulling back when times get tough.

When you, as an individual, face a tough month, you probably cut back on eating out or some other indulgence. At the same time, you pay your electric bill, your mortgage, and make sure you still have some left over to buy food. You have a priority list that defines what you need instead of what you merely want. Or, at least, you should.

Government, as dumb a beast as there is in the world, doesn’t recognize the difference. Once a thing is voted on and the money starts flowing, it’s a perpetual need and it often contains some mechanism for automatic growth. The government almost never steps back and says, “Yeah, that’s a nice service, but I can’t afford it this year. Let’s just not do that for a bit.”

Colorado’s TABOR (Tax Payers Bill of Rights)--which requires votes for tax increases, sets standards for government growth, and contains a ratcheting mechanism to decrease spending in times of hardship--was meant to address that. And it does, but TABOR has been undermined by voters, too (quite likely by many of the voters who helped establish it in the first place). TABOR says that you can’t raise taxes without the consent of the citizens and that spending has to contract in bad times. Other spending bills over the years have mandated increases regardless of the economy. Which is why that study cited in the DBJ story goes on to say this:

“Education, prisons and health care consumed about 54 cents of every general fund dollar a decade ago. They now eat up nearly 76 cents of every general fund dollar, and that figure will jump to 91 cents in five years if the average growth rate continues. Eventually, at this rate, there would be no money for other programs.”

The solution, to me, would be found in fiscal responsibility or finding programs to cut. That wouldn’t be the government way, though. The government way is to find some backdoor path to the citizens’ wallets.

And it almost always starts with someone saying variation of, “We’re the richest country in the world. Why can’t we spend just a little more and buy lunches for poor students?”

Or buy cell phones for the poor. Or fund massive new health care mandates. Or “protects” us from climate change with a massive and complex system of taxes, payoffs, and giveaways that no one fully understands.

Republicans utterly failed to hold back the tide of spending when they held the House, Senate, and presidency; a failure that speaks volumes about the almost intractably expansionist nature of government and a broader failure of the GOP to actually embrace the conservative values that it has so long preached. It’s no wonder that the citizens didn’t trust Republicans to be good caretakers of the nation. That doesn’t excuse the left’s--especially the progressive left’s--bullying us down the road to ruin just that much quicker.

But it’s not all gloom. Some enterprising souls are still finding ways to grab with both hands.

Rep. Ed Perlmutter of Colorado inserted a provision into the recently passed House climate change bill that would drum up business for “green” banks, such as the one he has invested in and his family and a political donor helped found in San Francisco.

The bill calls on bank regulators to promote green banking and says federal dollars should be used to support energy-efficient home improvements at government-funded housing projects.

Mr. Perlmutter, a two-term Democrat, has two investments in the 3-year-old New Resource Bank, which calls itself the nation’s first green bank. Among other environmentally conscious banking products, the bank offers home equity loans for consumers to make their homes more energy efficient, in addition to construction loans for green builders.

See? The American dream lives on.

Update: A similar question from Foundingbloggers. A wonderful site for conservatives (but you’re probably already a fan, aren’t you?).

This comes from the usually politics-free pages of AutoBlog:

The far right wing of the American political spectrum has begun channeling its displeasure over the federal government’s involvement in the restructuring of General Motors into calls for a boycott of the company’s products. Reportedly spearheaded by right wing pundits and radio show hosts, the boycott would be a response to the U.S. government taking a 60% stake in GM in exchange for forgiving most of the tens of billions of dollars loaned to the company over the last six months.

Reading through the comments is educational. I hadn’t realized that the only reason that someone might be opposed to “saving” GM was because that person would like to see the country and Obama fail regardless of the cost to the nation. Philosophical and pragmatic worries about government involvement in private industry are entirely beside the point. Patriotic folks who care about jobs and the economic health of the company are well advised to tow the party line--even if it isn’t their party and even if it defies their principles and beliefs about what our government’s role should be when faced with failing companies (even ones as big as General Motors).

As I’ve said before, I’m not much for boycotts. But I won’t buy a car from a company that is being run like British Leyland back in the seventies. I also believe that our government at least twice overstepped proper bounds in dealing with the collapsing General Motors and Chrysler--first when the bailout plan under the Bush administration and second with the Obama administration’s handling of both GM and Chrysler in their bankruptcies. We could take specific points of contention, but that would be sidling past the point: I’m not skeptical about these deals because of Obama or any latent hatred of working class folks, it’s because I think the plans and our government’s involvement is bad for the companies, bad for the nation, and will ultimately be bad for the products.

Which apparently makes me a member of the “far right wing.”

Read the rest. And, remember: “dissent is the highest form of patriotism” is so 2007.

Update: Lotsa fringe right-wingers out there:

Fifty-one percent (51%) of Americans nationwide say they are now more likely to buy a Ford since that company did not take any bailout funding. Only 12% are less likely to buy from Ford.

There is an interesting political twist to the attitudes about buying GM. Currently, among those who hold populist or Mainstream political views, 46% own a GM car. But just 15% of those in the Mainstream are Very Likely to buy their next car from GM.

That’s a hell of a lot of fringe, indeed. I saw a picture of my mom in her 60’s leather hippy gear and it didn’t have that much fringe.

It was close, though.

Thank God they are ready to start quickly spending the money that they don’t have. I think they’re calling it the Recovery Act Implementation Plan. Go figure.

Phew. I was worried.

I mean, this slow descent into the Economic Pit of Doom was just killing me. Like tearing off those old school, bonded with Krazy Glue type Band-Aids, I say let’s get the pain over with as quick as possible so that We, the People can get on with fixing the damage this is going to cause.

...Well, no, that just seems unkind.

Anyway, speaking of something of which we weren’t speaking of, so to speak, I though that President Obama said he would stop rewarding companies who ship jobs overseas. Apparently I misunderstood, though. What he actually said was that he was going to encourage companies to ship jobs overseas.

For some reason.

The path to national prosperity is lined with ensuring that people don’t want to do business with you.

For some reason.

I’ve been un-blogging of late. I’ve been busy, I’ve been cranky, and I’ve been tired of pawing over the same well-turned earth that’s kept me occupied for the last five or six years of my life.

It gets a little tiresome after a while.

But every day just gets me crankier, hoping like hell that things (in a national, political sense) would turn a corner and we’d be heading down a Clintonian path rather than Sir Don Ryder. To anyone who has looked at what happened to the British auto industry after the government took a heavy-handed role in running the affairs of British Leyland, it should be terrifying to read these words:

Obama Halves Chrysler’s Planned Marketing Budget.

And General Motors, heading down the same path as Chrysler, should be terrified about the future of their company.

If you haven’t studied up on BLMC, now would be a good time because it looks like our current government plans on traveling a very similar path. Trace the paths of Jaguar, MG, Triumph, and Austin Healyey to see what happens when the government starts making decisions for auto companies. Even the latter day successes (Mini, for example) were bought up and are now run by others (BMW in that particular instance). Hopefully that isn’t the fate of GM and Chrysler, but I wouldn’t put my money on it either by buying stock or buying one of their cars.

Just sayin’.

Without going much into details, here’s a little story from my last week.

A bit ago, I decided that it would be nice if I had a newer car. Much as I love the old one, it seemed time for something different. Given my debt load--which is significantly higher than it should be--I wasn’t sure what kind of loan I was going to come away with. Would the limit be high enough for what I wanted? Would the rate be low enough to keep me feeling that happy, unscrewed feeling? I was pretty sure that the answer to one or the other was going to end up being “no.”

I was very wrong. In fact, I had pre-qualified myself with Capital One auto loans (they had carried my last car loan) and been given a rate of 5.76%, which sounded like a solid deal to me. The guy who helped us with our loan at Tynan’s VW here in Aurora looked over my credit report promised that he could do better. He did. I ended up with a JP Morgan/Chase loan at just 4.99%

Not bad.

I’m not writing this just to be writing, though, there’s an actual point. The point is that, if you were thinking about a new car but worried that the current credit climate might shut you out of a decent deal, you might want to take a look. The prices are low and there are good deals to be had (especially with the new cars, although I chose the 2008 to keep my payments down and get immediately past the massive depreciation that comes in the first few years of car ownership). 

100 million steps forward just in time for 5.7 billion steps back. Which hardly seems to be sending us where we wanted to go.

It feels like a card trick: keep your eyes on the $100 million in spending cuts and you probably won’t notice the billions in new spending that the administration has proposed. It is, in the final calculus, a pantomime of fiscal responsibility designed to convince the voters of his seriousness without actually having to do the hard work of being fiscally responsible. And the minuscule tax cut that we supposedly received is just window dressing on the fact that local taxes and fees are rising around the nation, the size of the national deficit has grown to unthinkable levels, and sooner or later someone is going to have to get around to paying back a lot of that new debt that is piling up in the corner. Buying me an extra Happy Meal with every paycheck won’t much change that equation.

It’s like a continuation of the Bush spending policies with an impressively redoubled effort to drown us all in deficit spending. Obama talked about making tough choices to curtail government spending, but he’s displayed a very different philosophy since he’s been in office.

I wonder how many people out there regret their vote right now?

Unfortunately, the fiscal sanity isn’t happening here.

Tendai Biti, Zimbabwe’s new finance minister, on Wednesday halved spending plans for 2009 and cut revenue projections 40 per cent, in one of the first signs of change under the country’s new power-sharing government.

Presenting his first budget, Mr Biti, a member of the Movement for Democratic Change, said the government would operate on a cash budget basis: “What we gather is what we eat.”

It’s an awful shame when the finance minister from Zimbabwe--one of the most blighted, backward, and failing countries in the world--shows the kind of sense that our own leaders here in America can’t quite fathom. Live within your means. Try to honestly project your revenues. Cut spending instead of printing another trillion dollars.

This is the most positive change I’ve seen in Zimbabwe in a long time. Not because it represents a big step forward (given the actual value of the Zim dollar, I still wonder how they’ll manage to dig out of the hole Mugabe dug for the nation), but because it represents some real power sharing. This is the first meaningful thing that’s been done by a member of an opposition party in a long time.

I wouldn’t and don’t trust Mugabe to keep his word, to share power peacefully, or to allow the kinds of changes that might ultimately save Zimbabwe from the final collapse that would destroy the government and fairly force a civil war, but it’s nice to latch on to a little hope (and change!) now and again. Especially when it is embodied in good ideas.

Read the story.

With all apologies to Perot, that huge sucking sound that you hear is tax money being sucked out of the next generation’s pockets to pay for our excesses. Which hardly seems like a fair trade, especially when the increasingly incomprehensibly-sized stimulus packages (tell me, seriously, can you even imagine one trillion dollars?) don’t seem to be having their desired effects.

Damit, I knew I left a definition of insanity here somewhere…

The prevailing belief in Majority Democratic Washington is that the way to improve the economy is not to increase production and productivity, but rather to borrow trillions out of the economy and let it trickle back in through government spending.

I’m starting to get the feeling that this is going to be a long and tiring four years--and hoping that Republicans can make strong inroads in the midterm elections.

Anyway, read the rest of that NRO post above. It has an interesting idea (a “zero cost” stimulus package) from a couple Republican representatives that has almost zero chance of being implemented. Instead we’ll get the big government double down that will put us even deeper in the hole.

Update: While my imagination may have come short, some folks have done a good job of explaining and showing us precisely what one trillion dollars might actually look like if it were converted into real money. Check it out. Thanks, Nathan!

Will congress double down on a bad bet?

Seems like a bad idea to me. But, then, I wasn’t a big fan of the last big bet.

A few days ago, I wrote the post about John Cramer, Guinness, and the fight against new taxes and bad economic policy. One of the friends of this blog (specific names are being left out of this as no permission was granted to share this conversation) wrote to one of his representatives about this very issue. What he received in response was a missive from la la land--a note about how even in these rough times a tax increase can be a necessary and good thing.

Before going forward, I have to say this unequivocally: in an economic climate like this, punishing the successful, the creative, the investors, and the very people and organizations that provide jobs and opportunities for Americans by raising their taxes is foolish. Raising taxes in ways that hurt the working class and limit their ability to make purchases is just as misguided. That some of the taxes that have been floated (especially raising or eliminating the Social Security tax cap) would move tremendous amounts of capital from the private sector to the US government to be used to offset the excesses of a dubious stimulus package makes me cringe. If the ultimate goal is to cripple the private sector, then this should definitely do the trick.

And that much of those tax increases are done for such high-minded reasons doesn’t change the fact that they will be harmful--and it irritates me that our elected officials continue to trot out one cause after another in an attempt to convince me that these things that will drag our economy down will actually act in some miraculous fashion to solve our current woes. They won’t, the money will be wasted, and the bureaucratic structures built to support the new and expanded programs will only suck more and more money out of the private sector, distort economic realities, and make it harder for companies (especially the small companies) to do business. None of that is good for jobs or our current crop of economic failures.

What we are talking about here--a small, new tax on alcohol--isn’t big in the context of our larger economic problems or even in the context of most states’ budgetary shortfalls. It feels like a little thing, but in taxes and budgets, a bunch of little things sooner or later add up to some really big numbers. In this case, those numbers just mean more drag on the economy and the possibility of job losses and failing businesses.

So when Mr. Representative trots out the public good by noting that the state pays for the sins of alcohol consumption and that new taxes will help defray those costs, I find myself feeling that little itch behind my ears that tells me that someone’s lying.

For instance, the Guinness site notes--and, in a depressing display of cynicism, I do believe the Guinness site to be a touch more honest than the typical US Senator or Representative--that taxes on beer and wine currently amount to 41% of the beverage’s retail price and that 59% of the cost of spirits (that booze to you and me) is in taxes. That figure on spirits is roughly supported by this article from US News & World Report, and my guess is that unraveling the trail of fees and taxes on every barrel, bottle, or glass of booze would be a tricky task, indeed. Point being, though, that I think most people would agree that if a compensatory tax were needed for losses incurred by government agencies for their constituents’ overindulgince in alcohol, that tax is already being paid.

Alcohol, like cigarettes, is a great target of opportunity, though. It’s easy to demonize and some puritanical folks are more than willing to buy into any argument that starts with, “Let’s talk about the evils of alcohol...” Unfortunately for the taxers, the public attitude towards drinking isn’t nearly as solidified as the public attitude towards Big Tobacco and recent attempts to raise taxes on alcohol continue to fail. Americans, bless us, still love to tip the bottle on occasion and don’t see the need to make the cost of our drinking any more onerous that it might already be.

So, no, sir, no new taxes for us.

I will, however, say that this particular representative deserves some level of credit for his response. My own emails and letters to my senators and representatives are rarely answered by anything other than form letters or form emails. Sometimes they even ignore in totality the subject of my letters. This gentleman not only answered the substance of the original message, but he gave his phone number in return and gave a reason (a reason I didn’t like, admittedly, but a reason) for his support of those new taxes. Good for him for at least engaging his constituents instead of simply ignoring the stuff he doesn’t like.

H/T to The Source