The Daily Gouge, Wednesday, August 29th, 2012

On August 28, 2012, in Uncategorized, by magoo1310

It’s Wednesday, August 29th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

Leading off the order in the mid-week edition, Byron York observes while….

Voters Fret About Economy, Dems Focus on Abortion

 

“This election, to me, is about which candidate is more likely to return us to full employment,” says former President Bill Clinton in a new ad released by the Obama campaign. Most voters would agree, at least if one believes countless polls that show the economy and jobs are the nation’s top concern.

So why are Democrats planning to make their convention a celebration of abortion and gay marriage? The Obama campaign has given a new and prominent surrogate role to Sandra Fluke, the former Georgetown law student and full-time lefty activist who achieved notoriety after Rush Limbaugh called her a bad name because of her energetic promotion of taxpayer-financed contraception.

This week, Fluke’s role has been to attack Republicans over Rep. Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” statement. “Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan tried to distance themselves from the remark,” Fluke wrote in an Obama campaign email, “but the fact is they’re in lockstep with Akin on the major women’s health issues of our time.”

Fluke is just one part of the Democrats’ plan to target Akin and the GOP on abortion. The Washington Examiner‘s Paul Bedard writes that the Democratic convention is becoming an “anti-Akin affair,” with party leaders lining up NARAL Pro-Choice America’s Nancy Keenan, Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards, the actress Eva Longoria, Sen. Barbara Mikulski and Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, in addition to Fluke, to highlight “women’s issues” in Charlotte.

There will be a lot of talk about abortion, all of it from one side. But not all Democrats agree with Fluke and her fellow speakers when it comes to abortion; in May of this year, Gallup found 34 percent of Democrats identify themselves as pro-life. And, perhaps more important to President Obama’s re-election prospects, 47 percent of independents describe themselves as pro-life.

Why would a party that wants to attract the largest possible number of votes this November make such extravagant pronouncements on abortion, knowing that one-third of its own members and nearly one-half of independents disagree?

And that’s just abortion. Democrats have already decided to make support for gay marriage a plank in the party’s platform. The party’s 15-member platform drafting committee unanimously voted to do so last month after hearing testimony from advocates of gay marriage. They did not invite any opponents of gay marriage to testify, suggesting that when it comes to writing a platform, the Democratic process is not entirely democratic.

According to the most recent Gallup poll on the matter, 65 percent of Democrats believe gay marriage should be legal, while 34 percent believe it shouldn’t. A full 40 percent of independents believe gay marriage should not be legal. And the Democrats are holding their convention in a swing state, North Carolina, where voters recently approved a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

The rational design behind all this is that Barack Obama can’t be re-elected without winning big among women. The newest Gallup polling shows equal gender gaps: Mitt Romney leads the president 50 percent to 42 percent among men, while the president leads Romney 50 to 42 percent among women. It’s a gap that has been consistent for months now, and Obama hopes to eke out a victory by making a few more women nervous about voting Republican in the last weeks of the campaign. “The Obama campaign believes that college-educated women, and the margin the president could win among them, will decide the election,” says a well-informed Democratic strategist not connected to the campaign.

But not all of this is a rational calculation. If you stand on the floor of a Democratic convention when a speaker is discussing abortion, you can feel the depth of the emotion that many Democrats feel on the issue. Conservatives like to say abortion is a liberal sacrament. Maybe that’s going too far, but it is very, very important. And when something means so much to a group of people, they can easily convince themselves that it means that much to others, too.

Meanwhile, the voters continue to say, overwhelmingly, that they want their president to focus on the economy and job creation. By choosing to spotlight abortion and gay marriage at their national convention, Democrats could give voters the impression that they’ve got their priorities all mixed up. Sandra Fluke may draw headlines, but does she really represent what voters think is most important?

Only if the voters in question believe it’s their responsibility to pay for Sandra Fluke’s birth control….

….while she continues to hop from bed to bed with the frequency of a ham radio!

Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, the WSJ suggests, quite accurately in our opinion,….

Todd Akin Is Not a Victim

His candidacy is hurting social conservatives.

 

Missouri Republican Todd Akin is vowing to continue his Senate campaign, though the question increasingly is: to what purpose? (It’s not like the other two highly-qualified GOP candidates are pro-abortion!) His continuing candidacy is harming the social-conservative wing of the GOP that he claims to be defending.

Mitt Romney and other Republican officials sensibly disavowed the Congressman after his recent comment that “legitimate rape” can be a contraceptive. For Mr. Romney, this was something of a Sister Souljah moment—not that he’s getting much media credit for it. But rather than leave the race to another Republican who might be able to win, Mr. Akin has since cast himself as a pro-life martyr. He’s blaming “party bosses” who he claims don’t really care about the sanctity of life the way he does.

He’s also received some unfortunate cover from Mike Huckabee, the talk show host and former Arkansas Governor, who wrote in an email to supporters: “Is this what the party really thinks of principled pro-life advocates? (Only those stupid enough to say what your boy Akin did.) Do we forgive and forget the verbal gaffes of Republicans who are ‘conveniently pro-life’ for political advantage, but crucify one who truly believes that every life is sacred?” (Great point, Huck; unfortunately, the GOP already HAS the Christian vote.  It’s the less-forgiving, less-forgetting Moderates we need to secure the White House and the Senate.)

We can understand why Mr. Huckabee wants to remain a hero to cultural conservatives in case he runs again for President. But he can’t possibly believe that Mr. Akin is helping the pro-life cause. Mr. Akin’s biological confusions merely play into the hands of the folks at Planned Parenthood who want to portray every social conservative as a fanatic with little concern for women. By playing for pro-life sympathy to save his own career, Mr. Akin is also dividing the GOP when it will need every vote to defeat an incumbent President.

Mr. Akin’s backers were calling on pro-life delegates to the Tampa convention to delay nominating Mitt Romney until GOP financial support is restored to the Missouri candidate. Some religious leaders are setting up Mr. Akin as the yardstick against which all “principled” pro-lifers must be measured. John Yeats, executive director of the Missouri Baptist Convention, has said that Mr. Akin represents the “mainstream of our values.” (Unfortunately, outside of Missouri, ignorance is neither a Christian nor Conservative value.)

That doesn’t seem to be true in Missouri, where in little more than a week Mr. Akin has turned a lead against vulnerable Democratic incumbent Claire McCaskill into a 10-point deficit. He is nearly certain to lose, a defeat that might cost the GOP control of the Senate and thus the ability to overturn ObamaCare. If that happens, many Republicans will hold Akin supporters like Mr. Huckabee responsible, and with cause. Mr. Akin and his allies will have hurt both their party and the movement they claim to believe in.

Victim?  No.  Absolute imbecile?  Most definitely.  And Mike Huckabee’s inability to distinguish the difference tells us all we need to know about his fitness for higher office.

Next up, two differing views on the best way forward for the economy; first, the Point, courtesy of Veronique de Rugy writing at NRO‘s The Corner:

More Evidence That Spending Cuts Are the Best Way to Shrink Our Debt

 

I was intrigued by this new Pew piece/poll (hat tip to Bruce Bartlett) called “Yes, the Rich are Different” that finds that 58 percent of people think the rich don’t pay their fair share of taxes. Polls like this one always makes me wonder what do people think would be accomplished (apart from the pleasure of soaking the rich I guess) if high-income taxpayers paid more in taxes than they do now.

As I have explained in the past, increasing taxes on rich people is unlikely to address concerns about income inequality. The U.S. federal tax code (not just the income tax) is one of the most progressive tax codes of the OECD countries. It is more progressive than countries with lower levels of income inequality, and making it even more progressive won’t address this issue.

But further, increasing taxes on the rich alone won’t address out debt problems moving forward. For one thing, there just aren’t enough rich people to pay off all the debt the government has accumulated; you can’t balance the budget just by taxing the 1 percent and any successes on that front are likely short-lived. My colleague and Duquesne University professor Antony Davies explains:

Want to balance the budget on the backs of the top 1 percent? According to CBO figures, the government would need to tax them at a rate of almost 100 percent. But doing so would make the top 1 percent poor — so, next year, the government would have to tax the top 2 percent.

This is where the middle class comes in. Politicians know the real potential for tax revenue lies with the middle class. Middle-income Americans far outnumber the rich and, at least for now, are taxed at relatively low rates. But even if we tapped the middle class, we’d have to raise tax rates by a staggering amount.

To balance the budget, we’d have to triple tax rates on every household earning over $100,000. Alternatively, we could merely double tax rates, but we’d have to do it on every household earning over $75,000. Not only are there not enough rich households to tax, there are barely enough middle-income households.

With the top 2 percent taxed into poverty, the year after that, politicians would need to go after the top 3 percent. Keep going down that path and, eventually, they’ll come for you.

Finally, this new paper by Harvard University’s Alberto Alesina, Carlo Favero and Francesco Giaviani of the University of Bocconi makes the case that increasing taxes on the rich (or anyone else for that matter) won’t help our country get out of the slump. The two economists show that the best way to get into a new recession is to try to reduce our debt-to-GDP ratio by raising taxes. They write:

Fiscal adjustments based upon spending cuts are much less costly in terms of output losses than tax based ones. In particular, spending-based adjustments have been associated with mild and short-lived recessions, in many cases with no recession at all. Instead, tax-based adjustments have been followed by prolonged and deep recessions. The difference is remarkable in its size and cannot be explained by different monetary policies during the two type of adjustments. In fact,we find that the mild asymmetric (and lagged) response of short-term rates cannot explain the difference between the two types of adjustments: heterogeneity in the response of monetary policy appears with a lag of one to two years, while the heterogenous response of output growth to EB and TB adjustments is immediate. We find that the heterogeneity in the effects oft he two types of fiscal adjustment (tax-based and spending-based) is mainly due to the response of private investment, rather than that to consumption growth.

If they are right, it means that comes January we should let sequestration follow its course (especially considering that for the most part the spending cuts are mainly reductions in growth rates rather than literal cuts; see this chart about defense spending) but prevent taxes from going up.

Another interesting finding in the Alesina/Giaviani paper is the correlation between spending cuts and business confidence. They find that “business confidence (unlike consumer confidence) picks up immediately after an expenditure-based adjustments.” They are going to look more into this question in order to determine whether there is a direct causation or simply an interesting correlation.

Next, the Counterpoint, brought to us today by the WSJ:

A Grand Old Growth Party

Above all, voters want to hear how Republicans will restore prosperity.

 

Inside the GOP’s Tampa convention hall this week, one prominent feature is a debt clock ticking toward $16 trillion. With due respect to that horrifying number, it’s the wrong figure to watch. What Mitt Romney and the GOP need above all is a growth clock and a persuasive case for economic revival.

Most Americans have concluded that Obamanomics is a failure, but polls also show that independent voters remain skeptical that either party has an answer to the malaise of the Obama and latter Bush years. This cynicism plays into the hands of President Obama, who is trying to convince Americans that 1.5% growth and 42 months of more than 8% unemployment is the best we could have expected.

Our view has long been that Republicans have the best chance of winning when they make the growth message their top priority. That’s especially true this year. The Reaganites had it right: Rapid economic growth causes the deficit and debt to fall, not the other way around.

Without a sustained recovery in national output to 3% growth or more and without putting millions more Americans back to work, there is no politically feasible spending reduction or tax increase that could balance the budget even if Ron Paul ran Congress. Tax revenues have remained below 16% of GDP for the last four years because the economy is in a slow growth rut. The growth deficit, not the budget deficit, is the great issue of our time.

The Reagan years offer an instructive history, because the economy’s troubles in the 1970s and the steep drop in real middle-class incomes (some $4,000 per household since 2009) were so similar to today’s. Reagan put pro-growth tax cuts and a rebuilt military ahead of his ambitions to balance the budget, and he was right.

After his tax cuts fully kicked in on January 1, 1983, annual growth averaged some 4% over five years, while employment gains were swift and long-lasting. The deficit fell in half from a peak of 6% of GDP in 1983 to under 3% in 1989.

The temporary surge in federal borrowing that the media fretted so much about at the time was dwarfed by private asset and wealth gains as national net worth doubled. Annual tax revenues soared to nearly $1 trillion in 1989 from $517 billion in 1980 with much lower tax rates.

The pattern continued in the 1990s, after the mild recession of 1990-91 and a decline in the rate of growth in the Clinton tax increase year of 1993. The real reasons the budget balanced by the end of that decade were the peace dividend after the Cold War ended, spending restraint mid-decade after the GOP took Congress in 1994, and above all another burst of economic growth. Revenue surged into the Treasury from 1996-2000, including a wave of capital gains after the tax rate was cut to 20% from 28% in 1997.

Even the last decade produced a revenue surge after the much-maligned 2003 investment tax-rate cut the rates Mr. Obama wants to raise. Revenues increased in nominal dollars by more than in any previous four-year period until the housing bubble burst.

Consider what would happen if economic growth increased today to what it would be in a normal economic expansion about twice what Mr. Obama has delivered. That return to prosperity would raise far more revenue for Uncle Sam than the panoply of Mr. Obama’s planned estate, capital gains, dividend and income tax hikes.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that each increase of 1% in GDP means $2.78 trillion more in revenue over a decade. Nearly every problem known to man is more solvable with a larger economy, and what better gift to leave our heirs.

This is not to say that cutting spending and reforming entitlements aren’t necessary or economically beneficial. The Obama era is different than the Jimmy Carter days because the baby boomers are that much closer to retirement and health-care spending has increased enormously. Our debt burden as a share of the economy is also higher.

So spending restraint is crucial. Under Mr. Obama, federal spending has taken between 24% and 25% of GDP for four years, higher than the recent average of about 19% or 20%. This spending share will rise rapidly once ObamaCare kicks in and if Mr. Obama?s other budget priorities prevail.

Mr. Romney is promising to reduce spending to 20% of GDP over time, which means taking it back to where it was in 2007. This is achievable. Meanwhile, Paul Ryan?s Medicare reform offers the promise of slowing the increase in health-care spending in the long run.

But none of this will be possible politically without the ballast of faster growth and rising incomes. And that is why Mr. Romney and the GOP need to resist what former Buffalo Congressman and supply-side evangelist Jack Kemp used to call “root canal” Republicanism. The road to revival doesn’t require a prescription of pain, suffering and tax increases. This brand of Republicanism repels voters, which is why it makes liberals cheer.

Messrs. Romney and Ryan have a defensible economic revival plan, marginal-rate tax reductions and reform, regulatory relief, sound money, and an energy policy to promote domestic production. American entrepreneurs, workers and investors will do the hard work. What they need to hear from Republicans in this election campaign are specific pro-growth policies and a message of optimism that they know how to regain America’s lost prosperity.

Wethinks they’re both right; tax cuts always maximize revenue, and the fraud, waste and abuse institutionalized during the last 3-1/2 years leaves plenty of fat to trim without cutting actual spending or impacting services.

Most importantly, Paul Ryan’s Path to Prosperity only reduces the rate of increase in government spending, while at the same time cutting tax rates across the board.  No draconian spending cuts; meaningful tax cuts and tax reform.

Speaking of hard-working American entrepreneurs….

Catholic business owners who beat back ObamaCare denied award from Denver City Council

 

The Catholic owners of a Colorado-based business won an injunction recently against implementing an ObamaCare mandate — only to be denied a proclamation now from the Denver City Council. Hercules Industries, a heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning manufacturer which employs 300 workers and has been in business in the Mile-High City for 50 years, was to be honored with a “Good Citizenship Award.” The laurel was in recognition of contributions to the community, including the historic restoration of company headquarters and, ironically, its “generous employee health care coverage.”

But the award was taken away after the owners of Hercules Industries, the Newland family, won the court injunction which said that they did not have to start providing employees with coverage that included abortion-inducing drugs, contraception and sterilization. As with several companies and colleges around the nation, the family that runs Hercules claimed that the mandates force them to violate their own religious beliefs.

Denver city councilwoman-at-large Robin Kniech originally motioned for the proclamation before taking it away, citing a heated election season. “I opted not to submit a ceremonial proclamation on Hercules Industries in the hope of a avoiding a partisan food fight in a rancorous election year,” Kniech said in a released statement last week. “Obviously, the hunger for red meat is just too great, and I regret that this has taken on so much interest. Kniech did not return a request for comment from FoxNews.com.

….State lawmakers responded to the controversy by issuing their own proclamation for Hercules Industries.

Say hello to Robin Kniech:

….the Daily Gouge’s Political Coward of the Week.  Congratulations, Robin:

And a yellow, French-flag-waving douchebag at that!

Moving on, in a paean to Tom Cruise….before he went off the reservation….Thomas Sowell relates why anything run by the government is overly….

Risky Business

 

Insurance is all about risk. Yet neither insurance companies nor their policy-holders can do anything about one of the biggest risks — namely, interference by politicians, to turn insurance into something other than a device to deal with risk.

By passing laws to force insurance companies to cover things that have nothing to do with risk, politicians force up the cost of insurance.

Annual checkups, for example, are known in advance to take place once a year. Foreseeable events are not a risk. Annual checkups are no cheaper when they are covered by an insurance policy. On the contrary, they are one of many things that are more expensive when they are covered by an insurance policy. All the paperwork, record-keeping and other things that go with having any medical procedure covered by insurance have to be paid for, in addition to the cost of the medical procedure itself.

If automobile insurance covered the cost of oil changes or the purchase of gasoline, then both oil changes and gasoline would have to cost more, to cover the additional bureaucratic work involved.

In the case of health insurance, however, politicians love to mandate things that insurance must cover, including in some states treatment for baldness, contraceptives and whatever else politicians can think of. Playing Santa Claus costs a politician nothing, but it can cost the policy-holder a bundle — all of which the politician will blame on the “greed” of the insurance company.

Insurance companies are regulated by both states and the federal government. This means that, instead of there being one vast nationwide market, where innumerable insurance companies compete with each other from coast to coast, there are 50 fragmented markets with different rules. That adds to the costs and reduces the competition in a given state.

When there are innumerable insurance companies, it is by no means clear that political regulation of them will produce better results than the regulation provided by competition in the market. In a competitive market, insurance companies would cover only those things that their policy-holders are willing to pay to have covered. Policy-holders would have no reason to pay to have insurance cover things that would be cheaper if paid for directly — or not paid for at all, in the case of things that are not a real concern to many people, such as baldness cures.

One of the factors in the number of the “uninsured,” for whom politicians are willing to turn the whole medical care system upside down, is the high cost of insurance that covers far more things than most people would be willing to pay for, if it was up to them. The uninsured who use hospital emergency rooms and don’t pay are a problem only because politicians passed laws forcing hospitals to let themselves be taken advantage of in this way.

Too many political “solutions” are solutions to problems created by previous political “solutions” — and will be followed by new problems created by their current “solutions.” There is no free lunch. In the case of health insurance, there is not even an inexpensive lunch.

Health insurance would be a lot less expensive if it covered only the kinds of risks that can involve heavy costs, such as a major operation or a crippling disability. While such things can be individually very expensive, they don’t happen to everybody, and insurance is one way to spread the risks, so that the protection of a given individual is not prohibitively expensive.

The problem of “pre-existing conditions” is a problem largely because of the way that politicians have written the laws — more specifically, by giving a tax break to employer-provided health insurance. If individuals bought their own health insurance, with the same tax advantages, the fact that an illness occurred after they changed employers would not make it a “pre-existing condition.”

There is no inherent reason for employers to be involved, in the first place. The fact that some guy manufactures furniture or plumbing fixtures in no way qualifies him to understand insurance for his employees. Including him in the loop adds another unnecessary layer of bureaucratic costs.

Political risks are the biggest risks.

Always….always!  Just as political solutions are always….always….the least efficient and most costly.

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s these varied and sundry beauties courtesy of Balls Cotton and Carl Polizzi….

….along with this candid photo of The Obamao worshiping his true master:

And in the Medical Section….

Pot users show drop in IQ from adolescence to adulthood

 

Gee; maybe that’s why they call it….

….”dope”?!?

Finally, courtesy of Bill Meisen, this month’s nominee for the Darwin Award:

Montana man killed on highway while trying to create Sasquatch sighting

 

The Bigfoot hoax planned by Randy Lee Tenley and his friends along U.S. 93 seemed destined to turn out tragic. From The Missoulian:

Tenley of Kalispell was standing in the middle of the righthand, southbound lane of the highway dressed in a military-style ghillie suit when two cars rounded a slight bend and could not avoid hitting the man. He suffered massive trauma and died at the scene, according to Montana Highway Patrol Trooper Jim Schneider. The crash occurred at about 10:30 p.m. at mile marker post 106.9.

“The camouflage suit was dark and subdued. It’s designed to break up a silhouette and blend in with your surroundings,” Schneider said, adding that the suit has strips of burlap designed to accept leaves and foliage. “It definitely hindered the ability of people to see him on the highway.”

Tenley was alone when he was hit and no one witnessed the crash directly, Schneider said. However, another member of Tenley’s party arrived at the crash scene soon after and spoke with the trooper about Tenley’s intentions.

“We can only speculate as to his exact intentions, but according to another member of his party his intention was to get people to believe they saw a sasquatch,” Schneider said. “It is a bizarre set of circumstances and it is certainly tragic.”

Tenley, 44, of Kalispell was reportedly struck by vehicles driven by two girls, ages 15 and 17. Given the relative inexperience of the drivers, and the darkness, the hoax could have easily caused one of the vehicles to crash, police say.

Alcohol was thought to be a factor.

No sh*t!  Rumors police found a roach and an “Obama 2012” button in the front pocket of Mr. Tenley’s ghillie suit remain unconfirmed.

Magoo



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