Great is the road I climb,
but the garland offered by an easier effort is
not worth the gathering.
Sextus Propertius
Photo of the Day
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| Courtesy of the (unaffiliated/unofficial) Armed Forces Tea Party |
Guest Quotation of the Day
Via Judge Andrew Napolitano:
There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men.On the Intellectual Dishonesty of the 77-Centers
Lord Acton
After decades of stridently and presumptuously asserting that men, who have mothers, sisters, and daughters, put gender bias in compensation ahead of family, despite zero evidence of any such economics-irrational conspiracy, the feminist ideologues continue to repeat their obsessive mantra of deception, regardless of the empirical data. Never mind that there is a current gender gap in favor of female college graduates with correlated higher income; Mark Perry of Carpe Diem has a current post discussing relevant statistics and explanatory variables; what particularly caught my attention was this excerpt from a 2005 NBER working paper:
There is no gender gap in wages among men and women with similar family roles. Comparing the wage gap between women and men ages 35-43 who have never married and never had a child, we find a small observed gap in favor of women, which becomes insignificant after accounting for differences in skills and job and workplace characteristics.
This observation is an important one because it suggests that the factors underlying the gender gap in pay primarily reflect choices made by men and women given their different societal roles, rather than labor market discrimination against women due to their sex.Best Economic Rant in a Sports Blog
From Gregg Easterbrook (HT Russ Roberts of Cafe Hayek):
Last week's word that the GDP grew at 2.5 percent in the second quarter is strong economic news; the jobs report due Friday may signal if the recent mild decline in unemployment will accelerate.
The good news about the second quarter applies to the period the sequester went into effect. Widely predicted to cause awful economic distress, instead across-the-board spending cuts have been accompanied by economic improvement. When the sequester began, unemployment was 7.9 percent and the most recent quarter had shown only 0.4 percent GDP growth. Now unemployment is down to 7.4 percent while growth has climbed to 2.5 percent. Perhaps these improvements would have happened anyway; perhaps trends would be even better without the sequester. All that can be known is that politicians and pundits said the sequester would be terrible for the economy, and instead so far it's been a positive.
Let's review some predictions:
"Sequester Will Sock A Vulnerable Economy" -- Washington Post banner headline on the midwinter day the sequester started. "The sequester is already hurting our economy," President Barack Obama said a few days later. Since these statements, the GDP is up about 3 percent, the stock market is up about 5 percent, unemployment is down half a percent and the housing market has become so strong there is talk of a new bubble. Three months into the sequester, American household net worth hit an all-time high.
Unnamed "experts" predicted that the sequester "will cost 700,000 jobs. Instead about 1 million new jobs have been added.
Early in the sequester, the New York Times' lead editorial declared that Ohio "could lose 30,000 jobs" while approving of a claim that federal spending restrictions could bring the University of Cincinnati's medical school "to its knees." Three months later, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported, "The largest over-the-month increases in employment occurred in Ohio." The latest figures show Ohio having 37,000 more jobs than in the same month of the previous year. Rather than kneel, the University of Cincinnati's medical school announced a $100 million expansion.
Psst -- want some insider news -- the country's finances are not falling apart.
Undaunted, in early August, with employment rising instead of falling as pundits predicted, a New York Times front-page story darkly warned "many job losses are predicted if the cuts remain in place into next year."
The Washington Post, newspaper of the federal government, ran a sob-story piece about affluent federal employees in a high-income zip code protesting the sequester. The first person quoted was a retired federal worker who complained that she can't be sure her pension checks will arrive on time. That is, nothing bad had actually happened to her, other than anxiety. Do retired federal workers imagine private-sector workers never have to worry?
The article veered off the rails when it introduced a conveniently unnamed federal official who finds any criticism of his government paycheck "extremely threatening and highly insulting." Just try the private sector for 10 seconds, fella! The conveniently unnamed official was said to work at National Defense University and therefore needed anonymity because he has a security clearance. But officials with high clearance only cannot talk about classified material, they do not surrender First Amendment rights on political policy issues such as the budget. It sounded like unaccountability was what the conveniently unnamed official really sought. Be that as it may, upon saying the official cannot be named, the Post declared that he makes public appearances:Just to make a few points on this neo-Keynesian madness, which convinces only the economically illiterate: federal spending has gone up almost a trillion dollars a year since the 2006 mid-terms, and we have little, if any job growth to show for any of that gross overspending. Why would we expect modest spending cuts to have more effects on employment than vast ineffectual increases in spending? The sequester didn't even touch most of the budget, i.e., entitlements, and only literally pennies on a dollar for the rest. When the 2013 fiscal year ends at the end of this month, Obama will still have added another $600B-plus to the national debt. We are barely making a down payment on that new debt through sequester. We are still spending hundreds of billions we don't have--an unconscionable surtax on our children whom will be challenged just to pay their own bills in a tough global economy.
FEE's Blinking Lights Project
I stumbled across the story on the FEE website. Let me quote the story:
[The Blinking Lights Project] stems from an experience Lawrence Reed had back in 1986, when he took a trip behind the Iron Curtain to visit freedom-fighters in communist-run Poland.The embedded song reflects on this experience, and I find it catchy (it's now on my songs to license wishlist).
There he met with Zbigniew and Sofia Romaszewski, two brave dissidents who had just been released from prison because of their work to spread the word of liberty.
They had run an underground radio station that communicated the truths that the state-controlled media wouldn’t let their people hear. They could only broadcast eight to ten minutes at a time before moving their location to stay ahead of the police.
Lawrence asked them “how did you know people were listening?” So they told him something he’ll never forget:
“One night we asked people to blink their lights if they believed in freedom for Poland. We went to the window, and for hours, all of Warsaw was blinking.”
McCain: Yet Another Bad Elephant of the Year Nomination
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| Courtesy of Washpo |
Another State Secession Movement: The Proposed State of Jefferson
I have recently discussed separatist movements in Texas, Maryland, and Colorado, but I was not aware of the long-standing desire for statehood of more conservative northern California and southern Oregon counties, an oasis of rationality on the Left Coast. Siskiyou County (CA) supervisors yesterday voted to resurrect the process, which I believed was earlier pursued around the start of WWII.
Oregon's Violation of Christian Bakers' Economic Freedom Results in a Business Closure
Readers may recall that a lesbian couple, unhappy that the owner couple did not wish to sell a wedding cake to them for any or no reason, including religious/moral reasons, filed a complaint, even after they found an alternative vendor. The couple has decided to shutter their storefront, although they will migrate to an alternative business concept. For interested customers, a link is here; I do not like the economic fascists running the state of Oregon; I like to provide moral support to unfairly treated businesses, whether it's a hot dog vendor in the Midwest, or BP stations during the oil spill crisis. Unfortunately, no wedding for me in the near future, and I suspect that my mom, whom has decorated cakes for years, would volunteer to do the cake if I would ever get married...
At least I'm not some trouble-making loser whom files nonsensical complaints. For example, if a gay bar refused to serve me, as a straight man, a drink, it wouldn't bother me at all. Of course, I would have to be really, really drunk to end up in a gay bar in the first place and probably would have had more than enough already (I've never really been drunk--it takes me 3 hours to drink a beer, and I haven't had an alcoholic beverage in 4 years. No religious reasons--I just don't like the taste, I like to remain in control of my senses, and perhaps I'm a little cheap.)
Political Humor
Congratulations to 64-year-old swimmer Diana Nyad. On her fifth try she completed her 110-mile swim from Cuba to Florida. See, 64 is not too old to swim 110 miles. It’s too old to host a late-night talk show, but not to swim 110 miles. - Jay Leno
[People of any age are willing to do anything it takes, even swim 100 miles without a shark cage, to escape the worker paradise in Cuba...]
About $30 million in $100 bills had to be destroyed because of a printing problem. Isn't that unbelievable? The only thing we know how to do right in this country is print money and we screw that up - Jay Leno
[Obama blamed it on the sequester; the printing press didn't go through its scheduled $16T debt maintenance check.]
President Obama is pretty clever. Did you see what he is doing to get Congress to approve the attack? He told them Syrian President Assad supports Obamacare - Jay Leno
[Assad is holding Treasury notes and is threatening to dump them on the open market; Obama is referring to these notes as 'financial weapons of mass destruction'.]
Political Cartoon
Senator Jekyll and President Hyde. He had one speech in 2002 against foreign intervention, too many more incompatible ones since becoming President...
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| Courtesy of Henry Payne and Townhall |
Stevie Wonder, "Sir Duke"
