Littlestuff Weekender-7-23-2011

Re: the debt ceiling and the budget. Any deal is a bad deal. For example, of the three Republican plans, the Cut, Cap and Balance is considered the best and the strongest. It however, allows an IMMEDIATE increase in the debt ceiling of $2.4 trillion. So, if $14.4 trillion is our meltdown point, how does $16.8 trillion improve things? That burning sensation in your back is from the knife if you voted for Republicans. Get used to it. Along as you continue doing what you’ve been doing, the knife will get plunged deeper and deeper. Boehner cares more about Obama liking him than he cares about saving the country from an out-of-control government. Say”Goodnight, Gracie.”

The issue is now and always has been government spending. Any plan that doesn’t seriously reduce government’s size and budget is doomed to fail. If they don’t reduce the size of government and the budget, our nation is doomed to fail. Concurrent with the issue of too much spending is the element of personal freedom. Every uptick in federal expenditures suggests increased federal involvement in our lives. Small budgets yield small government and individual liberty.

You are probably thrilled to learn that the Ohio Statehouse now has a full-service bar. The Capitol Café boasts a full-blown liquor license to better serve legislators, staff and lobbyists. Frankly, it’s not a big issue for me, but I would have two requirements: No running “tabs” allowed, and we should have full disclosure about the drinking habits of elected officials and their un-elected staff persons. Yeah, like that is going to happen. Wonder what the carryout business will be?

Our Monday Littlestuff-minoosha will address one of the more maddening aspects of political budgeting… the “out” years. They’re a sham and a charade. The out year projections are false and fake, and represent lies and looniness.

Yesterday was not so great for me. I had intended to attend the Warren County Fair in Lebanon, but was hindered by some Thursday dental work. I really enjoyed my time with the gang in Warren County last year…great folks, great fair.

Seneca County Fair is on the agenda for this week for Friday from noon to 4:30pm as I’ll be working at the N.C.O.C. booth. Look forward to seeing many friends. I used to show dairy cattle there back in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s. In the later years, I took a rather large herd, but in the early times, it was Elsie and me. She was a Brown Swiss, and I was often teased about my water buffalo because she had an amazing capacity for drinking (like a career politician). She was a true show cow who adjusted to the lights and action. A good critter and a loyal one. Cows are cool.

With all the steamy hot weather we’ve been having, I’m hoping the government doesn’t assume control of my well. My garden crops have been getting watered twice per day, and Big Brother may decide that someone in the Arizona desert shouldn’t be at a disadvantage…so they’ll ban water usage for both of us. Just sayin’. They’re that goofy.

The Senate on a strict party-line vote decided to “table” the Cut, Cap and Balance bill passed by the House. Doesn’t kill it, and will allow it to be brought back if the Democrats decide to have an “up or down” vote. This stratagem was done to avoid any Democrat being nailed for voting against it. They can now claim that they merely wanted more time to review all the ramifications. It’s a cowardly dodge, but at least all the Senate Republicans voted for the bill (against tabling) including the lefty dames from Maine. I suspect that they, too, saw that it was a “safe’ vote wherein they can claim to have supported it without putting it on the line. This vote was so typical of Washington….lots of sound and fury signifying nothing…except for a CYA vote.

It’s so sad that while the natives (25-30%) express angry discontent, the Democrats characterize us as militant unhinged domestic terrorists, and the GOP elite leadership views us as a petty annoyance to be manipulated and fooled. As our economic situation worsens, more people will join the ranks of the disgruntled and if the two parties continue to treat us like they have so far, a revolution of some sort (hopefully an electoral one) will be inevitable. Let’s pray that it will be successful.

Comment:   cearlwriting@hotmail.com       or     www.littlestuff-minoosha.blogspot.com

Safety First

The Nanny State cares about you. The Nanny State wants you to live life without facing any adverse situations….well, without facing difficulties that have not been caused by government. You see, when life throws you curve balls, those are bad. When government throws you bean balls, those are called “shared sacrifices.” The Nanny State is committed to protecting you from every type of imaginable or potential harm…except for the damages inflicted by the government. Even when I personally resent the Nanny State’s annoying meddling in my life, I could, at some level, understand the insatiable desire by the government to control so many facets of my life if they were not ideologically and agenda driven constraints. Many of the limitations and regulations do not make sense from an economic or a safety point of view, but do satisfy some misbegotten ideological purpose.

A glaring example that we have previously discussed on these pages is the banning of the incandescent light bulb in favor of the compact fluorescent variety. For the moment the House has suspended the implementation of the policy, but government never gives in, never gives up. The insanity of an ideological unproven “global warming” scare leading Congress and the EPA to ban a tried and true technology and replace it with a toxic-laden substitute illustrates the folly of much government regulation—particularly the ideological-driven rules. The collectivist attitude is blatantly apparent in this regulatory fiasco….preserve the planet from a theoretical future of global warming, but put individuals at risk with more expensive deadly products.

When any child loses his or her life, it is a tragic circumstance. According to the Product Safety Commission, in the last ten years 32 children have been mortally injured by baby cribs with sliding adjustable sides. With the publishing of the data the PSC has arbitrarily determined that ALL parents are too stupid or lack discernment to choose a crib for their children that is not so risky. So, they have banned the sliding-side infant crib, and forbade reselling of older models at garage sales and thrift shops. We are waiting for a definitive rule that bans “giving” the lethal cribs from one family member to another as has been the historical norm. While 32 deaths are regrettable and heart-breaking, the banning of the crib can, to some degree, affect nearly all of the 308 million residents of the nation.

Unlike the infant crib regulatory ban, RU-486, the “morning after pill,” is ideologically and politically correct. The statists promote unrestrained abortion, and resist any attempt to curtail the deadly industry. It is apparent that ideology trumps safety when the impact of RU-486 is examined. According to analyst David Alton of Great Britain, roughly 5-8% of RU-486 users experience severe complications…including death. So, the obvious question is “why are sliding-side baby cribs banned because of their dangerous potential when RU-486 has a much higher level of malfunctioning?” Clearly the answer is that Big Government and the Nanny State are driven by ideological considerations. Aborted children and their deceased mothers are an acceptable risk to preserve the right to destroy children at will according to the government’s priorities.

As the government and the multiplicity of agencies, bureaus and departments roam the country looking for ways to make my life better and safer, the unspoken factor is that every little regulation that makes my life safer also limits my freedom. Many would argue that the comprehensive examination conducted by the TSA at our airports is necessary to protect us from nefarious characters. We know, however, that their “so-called” random extensive observations have no basis in reality other than mere statistical happenstance. Profiling is forbidden because it may be deemed as discriminatory whereas groping small children and little old ladies in wheelchairs is considered acceptable. Once again, the Nanny State’s efforts to enhance our safety do little to make us safer and do restrict our personal liberty.

Finally, this observation does not involve product safety or the efficacy of pharmaceuticals. I wonder how can a government that is so concerned with the potential safety of every citizen when they interact with the private sector, be so nonchalant about high-level bombing using aircraft and drones? The resultant collateral damage from those sorties exceeds the losses by far from some of the issues they seek to regulate. Does our federal government practice gross discrimination by assuming that Libyan civilians or Afghanis are not as valuable as U.S. residents? Or is it that Nanny State’s real concern is for the power to control us? Our actual safety and well-being are secondary considerations. Every little regulatory element places another nail in our boxes. The motto of the new order is “safety first, liberty never, state forever.” Enjoy your safe trip toward tyranny, because it will be nearly impossible to come back.

Comment:   cearlwriting@hotmail.com     or     www.littlestuff-minoosha.blogspot.com

You Bet Your Assets

We typically think of assets as hard goods….things, but we know that some assets may be intangible. For example, your savings in a bank or your portfolio are not tangible. They are sheets of paper or printouts that represent to some degree hard assets. Other assets are not typically included in one’s balance sheet such as education, talent, skills and ambition. I have included some other descriptors for assets that are not generally included on the net worth ledger of a nation.

When one examines the real value of a country, there are some classifications of assets that rarely are manifested on the plus side of the balance sheet. “Known potential” is the class of valuable resources that are, as yet, untapped, but do have a clearly defined and measured potential for contributing to the national economy. Oil deposits, gas pockets and coal veins are representative of some of the known potential that we have in the United States…on land and in the water. Within the National Park Service are thousands of acres of land that might be developed for agricultural production as well as for the exploitation of energy and mineral resources. Another known potential is the 15 million or more unemployed people in the United States whose labor and innovative skills could be much better used than they are at the present time.

“Unknown potential” refers to resources that have not yet been calculated but whose potential could be significant if the right technology or extraction methods were employed. Desalination of seawater is such a resource…not just for drinking, but for irrigation purposes. If such a technology were to become feasible on a large scale, many acres of semi-arid and desert lands could be used for food and fiber production. In addition to the technological challenges, the development of the system would have to be concerned with recapturing of spent water. So, the potential does indeed exist although the means for realizing its full value is not yet available. Wind and solar power are at a similar stage. While energy can be reaped from them, they lack storage capacity, cost effectiveness and reliability before they can be considered as bona fide sources. The potential is great, but more and better technology must be achieved before any of these potential sources can be consistently used.

Exploited assets are those resources that have been identified and reworked to create value. No resource, natural or human, has any real value unless it can be utilized to increase its inherent worth. Oil, for example, is merely a messy black liquid, but when refined it produces plastics, diesel fuel, gasoline and other by-products which function to fuel other industries as they create, construct or assemble items of value for the economy. Likewise, land has no intrinsic value unless it can produce food, fiber or provide other means of enhancing life. The exploited assets, therefore are those that are presently being used to increase value and economic activity.

Inaccessible assets are those that may exist in quantities great enough for meaningful use, but either for natural reasons, technological reasons or political reasons are not presently available. Vast quantities of geothermal power are trapped within the Earth, but we have not yet developed the means to exploit it on a grand scale because of natural barriers and technological deficiencies. Another inaccessible resource is children (at least in Western cultures). True, in some subsistence and emerging economies, children play an important role, but in most developed Western systems, the political consensus is that children are not considered integral members of the work force.

What is the purpose of this column? My goal is to illustrate that despite our current economic woes, we are a nation of vast resources. If our government would stop its punitive regulatory and taxation policies, many of our human and natural resources would be unleashed to produce products and increase the value of raw material. If government would cease its direct intervention and control of several vital deposits of exploitable resources, the private sector could transform them from potential to actual contributors to the nation’s economic activity. In addition, the development of many of our potential resources would increase the need for labor thus better utilizing the untapped human resources who are currently idle.

Government does not produce anything. All government activity is a drain on the economy … not a contributor. When government consumes 25% of the generated economy (GDP), funds become limited for economic activity that increases value. The two-edged stiletto wherein government places the knife firmly into the back of the nation is when government controls, regulates or limits resource development and when government consumes an inordinate portion of economic wealth. Our nation is not poor because we have a large cache of resources, but because of too-large government involvement, our economy is performing poorly. Government is non-productive and antithetical to generating value and wealth. Under our present economic circumstances, we cannot afford to have government control our wealth. Their consumption of the labor and productive power of the people places our potential for prosperity in peril. Government’s busy-body over regulating and rulemaking severely undermines the economic capacity of the nation. When Big Government is a player, the gap between prosperity and poverty looms large.

Comment:  cearlwriting@hotmail.com      or     www.littlestuff-minoosha.blogspot.com

 

Default, Dear Brutus.

Default,” Dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.” Shakespeare might be annoyed that I borrowed and corrupted his line from Julius Caesar, but he’s dead. “Default” is the power word of the week as statists scramble to coerce Congress into supporting an increase in the national debt ceiling limit. The dirty truth is that default is not a Constitutional option. Current monthly income for the federal government is just under $200 billion. The primary obligation for the Treasury is to pay the debt service first out of any collected proceeds. At current interest rates, the monthly cost for interest on the $14.4 trillion obligation is slightly less than $30 billion. In addition, the secondary Constitutional obligation is payment of Social Security benefits due to the hypothetical, mythical “trust fund.” Those payments run about $60 billion. It is clear, therefore, that the two Constitutionally-mandated disbursements will leave a balance of roughly $110 billion in the Treasury for prioritizing other outlays and payments such as military pay and civilian work-force payroll. The threats of impending doom, and starving grannies are gross misrepresentations…..lies.

If, for any reason, Obama or Geithner delay the Constitutionally-required disbursements for political purposes, they will be in contempt and should be subject to impeachment. Whatever they choose to do, legal or otherwise, the debt ceiling is a two-edged sword for the nation. While it is true that federal cash flow is sufficient to satisfy Constitutional and legal requirements, the massive size of the debt makes it politically difficult to lower taxes enough to generate an economic boom. Some will continue to argue that taxes must remain at present levels (or even higher) to raise funds for debt retirement. Given the history of debt service in the United States, this may be a bogus argument driven primarily by ideological considerations. No principle payments have been applied to the national debt for 51 years, so it seems rather remote that the government would feel compelled to pay down the outstanding balance. Certainly debt retirement would be beneficial for the fiscal health of the country because every uptick in interest rates would require billions of dollars more from the budget.

The debt ceiling and the debt itself are constraining in another way. It may create an artificial endorsement of the status quo on the spending side of the ledger. The political class may perceive the debt limit as defining the outer parameters of the spending matrix. They may convince themselves that as long as they stay within the defined limit, their appropriations are justified and defensible…no matter what the value, constitutionality or justification for a particular program or line item may be. A similar concern is that with the artifice of the debt ceiling in place, career politicians will be continually seeking to increase or looking for ways to circumvent it. Pet programs represent political promises for favored constituent groups. The political class will be fearful of returning the government to its Constitutional structure. They will fear the retribution of recipient groups who have become accustomed to government benefits. Concurrent with addressing the debt crisis and drastically reducing federal spending, the nation, people and politicians, must unite for the “weaning of America.” We must insist and enable the drying of the Nanny teat.

The kabuki dance that is taking place in Washington at this time is merely a small beginning toward what must be done. Systematic and reasonable spending reductions must be implemented to prevent a repeat of the current fiasco. The cuts should be vertical reductions with entire departments, programs and agencies being eliminated. Horizontal cuts are easier because they will not generate the furious responses of the affected agencies and their constituencies, but they are not effective and enduring. Merely shaving dollars from the top of every aspect of government leaves the monstrous apparatus in place to fight for restoration of money in the next and all subsequent budgets. It might be useful (and proper) for Congress to become familiar with the enumerated powers in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution of the United States. Even if they ignore their legal limits, they may at least attempt to fund only governmental functions that are relatively close to meeting Constitutional muster. I can hope, can’t I? We the people should commit to allowing some favorite programs to be cast aside if we are to work our way out of this fiscal maze. Now is the time for that “shared sacrifice” that the progressive-statists are so fond of demanding. Every American must be willing to sacrifice some program or agency on the altar of budgetary sanity and economic reality. Shared sacrifice, indeed, but I suspect the lefty crowd will battle openly…and underhandedly every attempt to restore order to our nation’s financial chaos.

Our situation is dire. Personally, I’m unconcerned if the Chinese pass us as the preeminent economic power in the world. It suggests that their billions of people may be on the cusp of experiencing some semblance of individual liberty. I do desire that we put our fiscal house in order so that liberty and prosperity will be available for all of our people. Default, dear Brutus, can be brutal. Correction will be politically, economically and socially disruptive. Each of us must be dedicated to the task. Et tu?

Comment:  cearlwriting@hotmail.com    or   www.littlestuff-minoosha,blogspot.com