Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if
they were going to be dead by midnight.
Extend to them all the care, kindness, and understanding you can muster,
and do it with no thought of any reward.
Your life will never be the same again.
Og Mandino
Image of the Day
Chart of the Day: Obama and the Fed Work Their Magical Recovery
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| Via David Stockman Contra Corner |
Via LifeSiteNews (my edits):
When he was a young boy, Fr. Mario Majano, 28, used to think a hero was someone out of an action comic book, a “flash, bang, superpower” kind-of-person. As he grew older, Fr. Majano believed a hero to be someone who put themselves in harm’s way for others, he said during the Verizon Center Mass for Life in Washington, D.C. Fr. Majano related at the January 22 event how he happens to know just such a hero, a woman who “against all obstacles, against all trials, stood firm, and would not budge, would not move from what her beliefs were, when everything else in her life seemed to sway.”
The first of three major trials came for this woman while she was a high school student and was raped and became pregnant.“Her family just let her be. She felt totally alone, [with] nowhere to go. [She was] practically disowned,” said Fr. Majano. A friend told the woman she “shouldn’t be going through this” and that she “didn’t deserve this” since she did not have any support. “This is impossible for you,” the friend said. “Just take the practical solution. Abort.”The woman said ‘no’ to abortion, and ‘yes’ to life, he said.
For a second time the woman found herself facing a trial, this time with a pregnancy from a man she loved but who had not committed to marriage. The choice she faced was either going to college or having the baby. Her family urged her to abort and not take the risk of raising now two children without a father. They coaxed the woman, offering to “pay for everything.” She said ‘No’ once again.
Thirteen years later, the woman now happily married, found herself facing yet again another trial, becoming pregnant during an intensive regime of chemical treatment for cancer. Doctors despaired of the new life within her. “Because the medication was so strong, there is zero chance that this child will be born normally,” they told her, and suggested abortion as the only way forward. “Normal or not, this is something I cannot, I will not do,” she told them.
“And to this woman, for her valiant effort, for constantly staying firm, and focusing on her steadfast love for what life is, I simply say: ‘Thank you Mom! Thank you very much!’” [Fr. Majano was the second baby.]
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| 53-year-old Rosa Majano gets an ovation during her son's speech |
The 2015 Index of Economic Freedom
The Battle of the Rants on Greece
One of the interesting things is how a large percentage of high tech and financial professionals/executives are "progressives" (consider how two in the top 2%, Gates and Buffett, are registered Dems; Soros famously underwrites many left-wing initiatives). So this morning's rant in an email subscription was not surprising:
Stocks started the week on their left foot, beginning on Monday with a negative opening that stemmed from a parliamentary election in Greece. Overnight futures traders reacted immediately to the election results by taking the S&P 500 down as many as 13 points. The premise was that if this radical left-wing party, which is opposed to austerity measures imposed by Greece’s financial overlords in the eurozone, were to abrogate its contracts, then the global financial system would collapse and markets would be left in smoking ruins. The facts and reactions were all messed up. The reality is that the austerity measures laid down by the eurozone on Greece are patently ridiculous and have completely failed to help that country arise from its indebtedness and move toward a long-term solution. The people of Greece were just fed up with all the lies and corruption of the political parties that got the country into this mess, and sought a party that might have a backbone, or at least a new potential solution.A little perspective here. Thornton examines Krugman et al.'s rejection of GOP "austerity":
President Barack Obama has recently released his budget in which he calls for an “end of austerity.” This is an amazing statement from a president whose government has spent the highest percentage of GDP in history and added more to the national debt than all past presidents combined. [My note: he is referring to publicly-held debt, not the $4T-plus in social security reserves.] While the 2009-2012 budgets have been relatively flat, they are still more than 15 percent higher than in 2008 and 75 percent higher than in the previous decade. This four year leap in spending was financed with a $5 trillion increase in the national debt. [It's now more like $7.5T.]Krugman refers to cuts in government spending. But as Hollenbeck points out there are basically at least three forms of austerity: (1) the high tax/high spend Krugman/Obama model; (2) the high tax/(gimmick) low spend Merkel/IMF model; (3) the low tax/low spend Austrian/"real austerity" model.
Let’s take a closer look at the Merkel form of austerity being implemented in Europe in which governments “plan” to cut their spending and raise tax revenues. Of course, “planned” cuts are not actual cuts. Four years after the crash of 2008, the UK government had only implemented 6 percent of planned cuts in spending and only 12 percent of planned cuts in benefits. In almost all European countries, government spending is higher today than it was in 2008. A new study by Constantin Gurdgiev of Trinity College in Dublin examined government spending as a percentage of GDP in 2012 compared with the average level of pre-recession spending (2003–2007). Only Germany, Malta, and Sweden had actually cut spending. Although several governments have raised tax rates, tax revenues have collapsed in response. The large and growing black markets in Greece, Italy, Spain, and even France are a testament to wrongheaded European tax policies. Current commitments to reign in tax fraud are a joke when tax rates are already at nosebleed levels.Okay, got it? When tax levels are too Draconian, we see an expanding black market, high levels of tax avoidance/fraud. The way you expand the tax base is to promote low, consistent tax policy. High taxes and regulatory policies smother tiny shoots of economic growth. Where did we see real austerity?
Growth will come from the private sector, and the austerity we need is one that makes the private sector larger than the public sector and one similar to that implemented in 1920 in the United States. In what Thomas Woods calls “The Forgotten Depression of 1920,” the U.S. government cut spending 50 percent and sharply reduced taxes. The public debt was reduced by a third, while monetary policy was kept on hold. The economy recovered quickly (in 18 months) and by 1923 the unemployment rate had fallen below 3 percent.Now let us recall that just over 1 in 5 Greek workers are in the public sector. This comes from John Sfakianakis, a Greek economist:
A more recent example of similar tactics is Latvia which followed a similar strategy in 2009-2010. It cut government spending from 44 percent of GDP to 36 percent. It fired 30 percent of the civil servants, closed half the state agencies, and reduced the average public salary by 26 percent in one year. Government ministers took personal wage cuts of 35 percent, although pensions and social benefits were barely reduced and the flat tax on personal income was left untouched at 25 percent.
The Latvian economy dropped 24 percent in two years, but rebounded sharply in 2011 and 2012 with yearly real growth of over 5 percent. Unemployment hit 20.7 percent in 2010, but has steadily declined to a little over 12 percent today. Because the cuts prompted deregulation, Latvia enjoyed a boom in the creation of new enterprises in 2011. It was able to transition from a bloated construction sector to a vibrant economy of many small- and medium-sized enterprises.
The expansion of Greece’s huge government sector took decades to create, but its growth in recent years has been particularly striking. Public employment grew by fivefold from 1970 through 2009 — at an annual growth rate of 4 percent, according to a recent academic study by Zafiris Tzannatos and Iannis Monogios.. Over the same four decades, employment in the private sector increased by only 27 percent — an annual rate of less than 1 percent. In a report last year, the World Economic Forum ranked Greece’s public institutions No. 84 in the world. Germany was 13. Wages in the public sector were on average almost one and half times higher than in the private sector. Government spending on public employees’ salaries and social benefits rose by around 6.5 percentage points of G.D.P. from 2000 to 2009, while revenue declined by 5 percentage points during the same period. The solution was to borrow more. Public sector wages account for some 27 percent of the government’s total expenditures. As the crisis has worsened, Greece has shed some government workers, mostly through retirement, but it has failed to implement a so-called labor reserve law last year, which called for the eventual slashing of 30,000 public sector jobs. According to the country’s national statistical service, since December 2009 the number of people working for the government is down 12 percent. But the number of workers in the private sector has dropped by 55 percent. [This article is from 2012.]This is from a Reuters piece also from 2012, noting a new target of 40,000:
Athens pledged last year to gradually lay off 30,000 civil servants from an estimated 700,000 public sector employees as part of its bailout deal. Under the failed plan implemented by the previous socialist government, the 30,000 civil servants were supposed to be placed in a "labour reserve", where they would receive 40 percent of their salaries for a year before being laid off. Only 6,500 left, mainly through retirement. Greece has repeatedly fallen behind targets agreed with its lenders,
The Statists always squeal like a stuck pig when it comes to protecting their headcounts, which are wholly paid at the expense of the private sector. Note that at the start of the Great Recession almost all of the first 4.5M people losing jobs were in the private sector. Obama made a priority of "investing" in education (and states were able to work with that in a budget shell game), while he tirelessly promoted government employment, college debt forgiveness as a government hiring perk, and when the private sector seemed to be closing the gap in jobs lost, Obama argued the bureaucrats weren't getting their "fair share" of new jobs. Government employee compensation went largely untouched, and any freezes were limited in duration. Instead of cutting taxes and regulations to spread the recovery around in the real economy, he doubled down on anti-growth measures, claiming we couldn't afford not to steal even more from the economically successful, not that he was at all reluctant to add $7.5T more to the deficit--and counting.
I haven't reviewed the full record of the outgoing administration, except they have attempted to accommodate the IMF/Merkel model of austerity and seem have turned the corner with modest economic growth. This source argues that many structural reforms are behind schedule, and given a high unemployment, sluggish economy, the sheer percentage of unemployed people alone was enough the threaten the incumbent regime's grasp on power in a multi-party election. Let's note that despite improvements, say, in privatizing some State assets, investors have been hesitant because of the emerging economic uncertainty of a left-wing government, which seems to be promising to rehire laid-off government workers, et al. It does seem that the government's priorities were backwards: tax increases first; spending reforms later. What Greece needed was not higher taxes, but lower taxes and regulatory reform along with a sharp knife on public disbursements.
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Lisa Benson via Townhall |
Celine Dion, "Have You Ever Been in Love"
