Category Archives: Economy

Economy, Politics

Freedom Is The Best Medicine

Economically speaking, times are tough. Just how long it will take to recover from the current financial situation will depend on the solution. So far, I’m not seeing the right solution. Driven by political objectives instead of economic ones, both Bush’s and Obama’s medicine will make matters worse.

Then, there are some people that think we’ve just grown too big for our own britches and maybe we need to reevaluate this whole capitalism thing. Like Timothy Garton Ash, writing in the guardian.co.uk suggesting that ‘a large part of humankind has to be excluded from the happy benefits of growth or our way of life has to change.’

On its face, that represents a false choice. His reasoning behind it is no friend to freedom. It is socialism to one degree or another.

His article about capitalism making hard choices misses the obvious. Ash says . . .

It must be obvious that the planet cannot sustain 6.7 billion people living as does today’s middle class in North America and western Europe – let alone the projected 9 billion world population in mid-century. Either a large part of humankind has to be excluded from the benefits of prosperity or our way of life has to change.

The ‘obvious’ to me means freedom and free-market economies. What the rest of the deprived world needs is freedom. It is not a coincidence that the most desperate parts of the world lack such freedom. Prosperity does not beget prosperity. Freedom does.

Would not the goal be to see them help themselves for once in a few thousand years, like the US has done in these last 230 years, rather than to dismiss what has demonstrably worked by having government run the show? When people have a choice of being free to speak, free to move, free to market, free to keep private property, and free to worship, or not, they will choose freedom. And when they do, they will go a long way in resolving their problems.

link: 2009 brings hard choices over the future of capitalism

Economy, Organized Labor, Politics

Card Check, Intimidation?

Here’s an interesting take, and proposal on ‘Card Check,’ the quid pro quo of Democrats for labor unions.

Let the unions have their “card check” provision–allowing them to substitute publicly-collected, signed cards saying “we want a union” for a secret ballot vote. If the union gets 51% of the employees to sign the cards, it gets recognized. But let the employer also collect cards from employees who don’t want a union. If the employer gets 51% the union has to go away for five years. You’d hear soon enough about how collecting cards in public is unfair, opening the door to pressure tactics, intimidation, etc.. …

links: Kausfiles | Employee Free Choice Act Is Democrats’ Quid Pro Quo

Economy, Fair Tax

An Open Letter to the President, the Congress, and the American people

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Below is an open letter to the President, the Congress, and the American people concerning reform of the Federal Tax Code from economists and educators in the United States. For those unfamiliar with The Fair Tax, this letter will give you a good overview of it. The letter can also be found at FairTax.org. Please share it with others.

Continue reading An Open Letter to the President, the Congress, and the American people →

Economy, Media, Pensacola, Politics

Even Blogs Are Cutting Back

It is happening every day now. Businesses are taking actions to remain in business, not to mention be competitive in today’s economic climate. You see it happening in Newspapers, broadcast radio, and now GoLeftTV on the Internet.

Obviously, the current state of the economy is not good. But that hasn’t always been the case. These media have had problems generating revenue for years. Adding to that, one could argue that the product these media are delivering is defective to the point that there is not enough support in the free market to keep them in the black, forcing them to find a Sugar Daddy like George Soros to keep them going. Air America Radio seems to have found Big Labor, you know, one of those evil ‘special interest’ groups. Ring of Fire Radio has resorted to Google Ads. And GoLeftTV has apparently given up and moved their site to YouTube, which is free. It is a sign of the times.

related links: Go Left TV Takes On Conservative Media | Newspapers are feeling the economic pinch, too | Could Newspapers Be The Next Bailout?

Economy, Fair Tax

The Laffer Curve And The Fair Tax

The notion that increasing taxes will increase revenue is bogus. Winston Churchill nails it with this famous quote, “We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.”

There are examples in the United States that demonstrate that revenues increase by lowering taxes, and decrease by raising them. There is an optimum point in the taxes/revenue equation and it has a name. It is called the Laffer Curve.

Since classical economic theory back in the early part of the 20th century economist have always known about money circulation. What is referred to as velocity. The faster money goes through the economy the more money people make and the more taxes are collected. Since then the equations have gotten a lot more complex with partial differentials, regression analysis and other mathematics. The principals are the same. The faster the economic activity the more jobs, income and taxes.

So how do we get a faster economy? There has to be some tax rate that allows maximum tax collections right? Yes there is. Arthur Laffer took a simple business principal studied by millions of business majors the world over. The maximum profit point or maximum revenue point. It the point where the price of your Chevy trucks makes you the most profit. Charge too much and you lose customers. Charge to little and you lose money. It’s not that complex. Disney does it for ticket prices. Walmart does it for their store pricing policies. All business does it. So why when Arthur Laffer does this same thing for government maximum revenues is he ridiculed for “trickle down,” “Voodoo” and other names too discredit his theory?

By understanding the Laffer Curve and the adoption of the Fair Tax, you will easily see how beneficial and growth oriented the Fair Tax would be to the economy.

Please check it out.

Link: Fountainhead Zero: Taxes 101: The Laffer Curve

Economy, Politics

Bailout Dies, Sending The Right Message

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Yea, for now. In the auto industry’s economic troubles, or rather, the Big 3’s economic troubles, opportunities abound. Resisting the knee-jerk reaction to ‘rescue’ the Big 3 by simply throwing good money after bad, it is time to turn the lemon into lemonade by showing the socialist world how free-market economies recover from setbacks without government intervention. The path toward regaining profitability is through procedures called a Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Companies that can successfully reorganize and restructure will rescue themselves and all the jobs that go with it. And to the survivors go the rewards. Rewards to consumers, auto workers, stockholders, and the companies themselves.

Proponents, including the outgoing and incoming Administrations, of the misnomer of a process called a bailout, are saying that a bailout is necessary in order to avoid a disorderly bankruptcy process. They say this with a straight face, as though a government takeover, a nationalization, auto Czar and all, of the auto industry, including new rules on what kind of cars they have to make, will be an orderly and fiscally responsible action. A responsible action is one that gives the Big 3 a chance to reorganize into a company that can make a profit again. The ‘bailout’ plan is nothing more than a nationalization of a failing business model with taxpayers footing the bill with no end in sight.

Today, the Senate did the right thing by sending the right message to the White House,the Big 3, and the UAW.

link:

Economy, Media, Pensacola, Politics

Could Newspapers Be The Next Bailout?

That newspaper publishers are in tough times is nothing new. Circulation and advertising have been falling for a few years now. And when you consider what percentage of their advertising revenue depended on car dealers, they are seeing their difficulty being compounded.

A snapshot from today’s headlines should tell you how newspapers are going have to be creative, from a purely business standpoint, in order to survive.

The ill-advised bailouts we’ve already seen do not justify yet another one for this industry. Like automakers, this industry needs to change to meet the times as well. But not at taxpayers’ expense.

Some on the left are falling back to another FDR program, focusing on the writers that are finding themselves out in the job market. About 15,000 of them so far. So what kind of make-work program would this ‘Federal Writers Project’ look like you ask?

Right out of the Saul Alinsky and Bill Ayers handbook . . .

Today, there are many dislocated “old media” journalists from newspapers, radio, and television on the street–here I declare my personal interest, as one of them–who could provide a skilled pool to staff a new FWP. But since these journalists represent only a fraction of the larger displaced workforce, it is fair to ask what the public benefit would be of money spent.

This time, the FWP could begin by documenting the ground-level impact of the Great Recession; chronicling the transition to a green economy; or capturing the experiences of the thousands of immigrants who are changing the American complexion. Like the original FWP, the new version would focus in particular on those segments of society largely ignored by commercial and even public media. At the same time, the multimedia fruits of this research would be open-sourced to all media, as well as to academics. As an example, oral history as a discipline has made great strides in the past 70 years, and with the development of video techniques, the forum of the Internet could make these multi-media interviews widely available to schools and scholars, as well as to average Americans.

And how it might work? According to Mark I. Pinsky at The New Republic, it would, naturally, involve colleges and universities, liberals’ home away from home to manage the program.

Administering the new FWP as an individual grant program through community colleges and universities could minimize bureaucracy and overhead. In consultation with the Obama administration–perhaps through the National Endowment for the Humanities–and Congress, guidelines could be established and a small staff assembled in Washington to oversee the projects, in the form of grants, rather than hourly wages. Projects could be pitched locally to colleges, or suggested and posted by them, vetted preliminarily and then approved or rejected by the national staff.

If the Obama administration decided to include the newspaper publishing industry in some kind of bailout, wouldn’t that be a conflict of interest?

link: Write Now

UPDATE: 17:20, This morning Tribune Co. was reported to be considering Chapter 11. They have now filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Economy, Organized Labor, Politics

Plan B For Automakers, Do Nothing

Executives from the Big 3 automakers are in Washington making their case for $34 billion dollars (up from $25 billion a week ago) to ‘bail’ them out.

Their plan amounts to things they should have done years ago, but still amount to nothing more than duct tape over a gaping hole in the hull of their ship. Not one of them mentioned bankruptcy or getting out from under their current union contracts. That’s where the hole is and that’s why any amount of money now is just duct tape. It will also be nationalizing an industry doomed to failure if it doesn’t cleanse itself of the unnecessary union overhead that a bankruptcy affords them. All for the express purpose of propping up a labor union. I’m sorry, I believe our economy comes before a labor union.

GM’s COO Fritz Henderson is only fooling himself when he says that there is no Plan B. Of course there is. In this case, when you have an operation that ‘can’t fund’ itself, bankruptcy is always an option.

“There isn’t a Plan B,” said GM Chief Operating Officer Fritz Henderson. “Absent support, frankly, the company just can’t fund its operations.”

These auto execs seem unwilling to cut the umbilical cord to the UAW. That leaves the only other option, doing nothing. Why? Because Nancy Pelosi will get them the money they want one way or the other, making the automakers’ appearance this week before congress the obligatory dog and pony show. Pelosi is out to protect and preserve the UAW, not the company that employs them, and these execs know it.

“I believe that an intervention will happen,” Pelosi said at a briefing in Washington. “Everybody is disadvantaged by bankruptcy, including our economy, so that’s not an option.”

Pelosi said Congress will either approve new loans for the auto industry or the Bush administration will provide funding through the $700 billion financial-markets rescue plan approved by Congress last month.

Unfortunately for us taxpayers, and fortunately for the UAW, they will get their (your) money. Don’t you just love it when free enterprise capitalism is interfered with by the government? What makes it worse in this case is that the motivation is only to help big labor, Democrats’ special interest group.

related links: Big Three survival bailout requests rise to $34B | Pelosi Says Bankruptcy by Automakers ‘Not an Option’

Economy, Fair Tax, Pensacola

Mike Huckabee Comes To Pensacola Friday Nov 28

Former Arkansas Gov. and Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee will be coming to Pensacola Friday night. Huckabee is a supporter, a passionate supporter, of the Fair Tax. It will be for a book signing of his new book ‘Do the right thing.’

Even if you’re not interested in his book, but you support the Fair Tax, how about showing up (you know the media will be there) to thank Gov. Huckabee for making the Fair Tax part of his campaign platform as well as his continued support of it.

He will be at the Barnes & Noble on Airport Boulevard between 8-9pm. If you can’t make it, you can get the book here.

This will be his last stop of a five city trip on Friday.

link: fairtax.org

Economy, Politics

The Fair Tax, Economic Recovery

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The FairTax plan is a comprehensive proposal that replaces all federal income and payroll based taxes with an integrated approach including a progressive national retail sales tax, a prebate to ensure no American pays federal taxes on spending up to the poverty level, dollar-for-dollar federal revenue neutrality, and, through companion legislation, the repeal of the 16th Amendment.

Do yourself a favor and get educated on The Fair Tax. The Fair Tax is the result of $22 million worth of research by credible economists from around the country whose task was to come up with another way to fund the operations of the country. The task was qualified to the extent that the result would be ‘revenue neutral.’ That is to say the system must be able to generate as much money as the government is currently generating with the current system through federal withholding and payroll taxes, self-employment taxes, alternative minimum tax, estate and gift tax, and capital gains tax, all of which would be replaced by the Fair Tax. And from that point as the economy grows, so grows the treasury. It is a pro-growth, as opposed to punitive growth, taxing system.

Consequences paramount to converting to the Fair Tax system are three-fold.

First, your individual take-home pay increases dramatically. Without the federal withholding and payroll taxes being deducted from your pay, you get all your pay in every paycheck. This alone is the biggest stimulus to your personal economy as well as our national economy. And it doesn’t put the nation further into debt in the process. Because the taxing revenue is generated by consumption, the tax base includes everyone who buys anything new, not just the working people in America. ‘Everyone’ includes citizens and non-citizens including illegals, foreign diplomats and tourists. And because it is a sales tax, the so-called underground economies are no longer exempt from contributing. Everyone will contribute to funding the government and our Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs.

Secondly, it takes the ‘tax hammer’ away from politicians who use it to control every aspect of our lives and business and industry in the United States. It transfers the power from Washington politicians directly back to you. It is this stripping of power from the political class that generates the most objection from the political class, and the most outrageous criticism and unfair demagoguery, of the Fair Tax. Under the Fair Tax, our politicians will be left with nothing to do except their job of governing and living within their means, just like you and I have to do. And since filing of your personal income taxes will cease, April 15th becomes just another day to enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

While it is still fresh in your memory, take a look back at the presidential campaign and the amount of press and attention that was given to taxation by both candidates. Besides energy, the other topic was ‘my tax plan is better than your tax plan.’ And polarizing political tactics like class envy and class warfare became all too prominent. Absent tax laws to talk about, the voters would have learned more about the candidates and ‘the real issues.’

Third, but certainly not last, the change to the Fair Tax alone would bring back foreign-held capital, estimated at between $10 to $15 trillion, that economists predict will flow into the US economy with enactment of the FairTax. That is trillions of dollars of business that has fled this country because of its taxing system, the second highest in the world. As an added bonus, companies looking to do business in the United States that have not yet come here, would have the incentive to come here. The job creation and wealth creation associated with it will spur the economy more than any tax-and-spending Democrat or Republican in Washington could dream of.

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