For attractive lips, speak words of kindness.
For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people.
For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry.
For beautiful hair, let a child run his or her fingers through it once a day.
For poise, walk with the knowledge that you'll never walk alone.
Audrey Hepburn
Chart of the Day: The Obama "Recovery"
Image of the Day
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| Via Independent Institute |
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| Via Christian Meighan on FB |
There are few European politicians I loathe more than Alexis Tsipras of left-wing Syriza, which won an expected plurality in Sunday's vote. However, the win was somewhat larger than expected with the leftist party just shy of a majority, allowing Tsipras the luxury of forming a governing coalition with a small party, in this case the right-wing Independent Greeks, which also rejects EU austerity measures. (Many of the right-wing parties have eurosceptic and/or nationalist streaks.) The leftists, of course, may not necessarily want a break from the European monetary union, but they want the Europeans (in particular, the more hardline Germans) to write down or forgive Greek debt held by Europe; they have promised a restoration of social welfare net spending. (This is basically a state of denial; Greece needs to downsize, not just tweak, its huge government overhead.) Early reaction from Germany is that Greece's access to cheap European credit is contingent to ongoing reform, and backtracking on reforms will go nowhere; they see any blinking on their part will set in motion similar demands from the rest of the PIIGS. So this battle has just begun, and it may well end up with the return of the drachma, which the Greeks would quickly devalue. Early reports from Europe's stock market show only modest impacts of the Greek election on stocks, although a slight drop on US stocks is hinted.
Sports, Nationalism, and Propaganda
Facebook Corner
(Cato Institute). "Acceptance of the president’s claim of auto bailout success demands profound gullibility or willful ignorance and virtually guarantees similar interventions in the future."
The way the free market is supposed to work is that a failed business's owners and/or managers should lose their investment and/or jobs. Fallout of that sort of free market failure is a negative impact on many workers directly employed by the failed business and by all of the connected businesses, upstream and downstream. Guess what happened in the auto-company bailouts. The owners (shareholders) lost their investment, and the managers lost their jobs. Even the bond holders lost a significant percentage of their investments. The government "bailouts" saved innocent workers jobs, not the companies. Hell, Chrysler is now owned by Fiat. It's not even an independent company.
This is truly RETARDED. The creditors lost their "rule of law" priority in the corrupt bankruptcies. The Socialist-in-Chief used taxpayer money to temporarily save his corrupt crony unionists. There were other car companies with US operations which were more than capable of making up the difference without taxpayer dollars at risk. The corrupt unions had unsustainable labor costs, period.
Because the demise of GM & Chrysler (which could have sunk Ford by killing the supply chain) would have led to a much worse recession, higher unemployment, bigger deficit, bigger trade deficit, and gigantic other ripple effects, especially on the communities that benefit from employment at car dealers & factories. The cost would have been much bigger than $12B, all told.
Yes, the business/economically illiterate "progressive" troll is gullible enough to believe the pro-union fear-mongering bullshit. Remember, the Socialist-in-Chief wanted to keep throwing bailout money at the two car companies, claiming no one would buy a car from a bankrupt company. (And of course, the government sold their GM stock below break-even at the expense of the taxpayer...) Recall that in the middle of the recession, few people were buying cars, and there were other car companies with domestic operations that also needed parts, workers, etc to raise capacity. The bankruptcy of Eastern Airlines did not mean the end of the airline business. The pilots and customers simply went to other airlines. In a dynamic economy, it doesn't mean obsolete plants will reopen under new management. But protectionism is never the answer; free trade forces management to innovate into a more competitive, sustainable business model. Artificially high prices for cars under protectionism lowers the standard of living for the American consumer.
Then you are saying the big banks should have gone down too??????? or are they different from other businesses??.....
Yes. But keep in mind the Fed, failed fiscal policies, and failed government regulation exacerbated the bubble. Even the GSE's, with implicit government backing, were buying subprime mortgages; how soon we forget the Democrats stonewalled GSE reform, and American taxpayers had to bail them out. The banks are useful scapegoats to business and economic-illiterate leftists. And what did the 111th Congress do? Instead of saying "let big banks fail", they simply wrote too big to fail into the law.
Chrysler bailout a success and paid back, GM a success they still have jobs and is or has been paid back. How is that nit a good thing. Wall street is our problem
All crony institutions, including the corrupt auto worker unions, were bailed out at taxpayer expense. Economically-illiterate leftists like the OP want to scapegoat banks, but in fact government regulation was responsible for bank issues with morally hazardous policies like government-insured policies. It's rich how leftists try to scapegoat overregulated bankers for government failures.
Finally, no, the auto bailouts were not paid back, and this whole process is clear corruption of our republican government. It was a textbook example of crony capitalism and unionism, an unconscionable precedent, a morally corrupt bargain of political spoils which violated the very concept of the rule of law.
(IPI). If your child causes trouble – inside or outside of the school day – school administrators can demand his or her passwords to social-media accounts under a new Illinois law.
This is a clear case where the cure is worse than the disease. I don't have an issue with the school monitoring usage of its own technology or restricting use of cellphones during school hours, but I worry about the risks to privacy and due process by the granting of ill-defined, largely unconstrained,/unaccountable, likely unconstitutional authority to school bureaucracies at the expense of parental rights and responsibilities.
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Chip Bok via Reason |
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| Courtesy of Glenn McCoy via IPI |
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| Courtesy of Ken Catalino via Townhall |
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists
Céline Dion. "I'm Alive".
