|
|
|---|
Sunday, 31 July 2011
As this is being written, early Sunday evening, the House has passed Speaker Boehner’s legislation, rejected on arrival in the Senate, and the Senate has rejected Majority Leader Harry Reid’s!
While the details of how much spending is to be cut are being negotiated, the sticking point is the insistence by some on a “balanced budget” amendment to the Constitution and that is likely the cause of this pathetic spectacle.
J. R. Kearl is a professor of economics in Provo, Utah. He has good academic credentials and, more importantly, he possesses a fair amount of common sense. In a July 19 opinion that appeared in the Deseret News, Prof. Kearl warned that “the balanced budget amendment now being touted by proponents is silent on distinctions between operating and capital expenditures, silent on distinctions between on-budget and off-budget expenditures, and silent on mandated expenditures.”
Those of us who lack degrees in economics may not be familiar with these terms, but they are crucial to how states—even those with balanced budget requirements—conduct the business of governance.
“Many states and local government have balanced budget laws, but they apply only to ‘operating expenditures’ and not ‘capital expenditures’ used to fund, for example, infrastructure and buildings,” wrote Prof. Kearl. “A balanced budget amendment that does not make this distinction rules out this option at the federal level.”
To write such an amendment would require language nearly as long as whole sections of the Constitution. It is impractical and unwise, particularly in the event of a war. It is not needed.
What the U.S. needs is a realistic budget that constrains the way its seemingly endless departments and agencies throw public funds at politically-driven pet projects, the “earmarks” we have heard so much about, and the conduct of functions that would work better if privatized.
As the Constitution defines this, it is “to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States…” Towards this end, the Constitution empowers the Congress to “regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with Indian tribes” among a number of enumerated duties of the federal government; read Article I, Section 8.
The United States does not need a balanced budget amendment. It needs to stop borrowing and spending money in stupid, wasteful ways. An amendment would only encourage a future Congress to create all manner of agencies and means to get around it and you can be very sure it would.
“In short,” says Prof. Kearl, “it is at best poorly written and incomplete, and at worst naïve and ill conceived.”
If a balanced budget amendment is the issue that is keeping the two houses of Congress from coming to an agreement to raise the debt ceiling, it is a very bad idea that ignores the nation’s obligation to pay its bills.
Cutting spending is the real issue facing a Congress so divided in ideology that even getting an agreement on that will be a major achievement. It is unrealistic to suddenly decide the nation should not borrow what it needs to meet its obligations. All nations borrow all the time.
There would have been no America if the Continental Congress had not borrowed from France to conduct the Revolution.
And this is hardly the first financial crisis in the history of the United States. We have been through a lot of them and, to our credit, have striven mightily to regulate our banks and other financial institutions that have too often failed us.
The present crisis reflects the way that, from 2000 on, we have been poorly served by those regulatory agencies and even by the ratings organizations, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, who sanctioned all manner of hocus-pocus financial instruments.
We are in this mess because both the federal government and individual Americans went on a borrowing and spending binge over the past ten years or so believing that the value of housing in America would always increase.
As they say in New Orleans, laissez le bon temps roulez, let the good times roll. Well, the good times are over until we get our house in order. To do that, the federal government will need to borrow enough to pay its bills.
After that, we need to elect legislators like Paul Ryan and others who will take a chain saw to the present federal government to reduce its size and its role in the economic life of the nation.
Too many feckless decisions have been made for too long by people who frequently came from or benefited from the very source of the problems we have. There are many entities to blame, but let’s get beyond the blame game long enough to pay our bills.
Capitalism is messy and risky, but it is still the best economic system ever devised. Diluting it with a lot of “social justice” programs as the U.S. has been doing since the Great Depression of the 1930s, has brought us to this point.
The least we can expect from Congress is to act swiftly and pragmatically at this point. Those calling each other schoolyard names should not be invited back to govern.
© Alan Caruba, 2011
Ferrari 575 GTC Evoluzione pictures and photos
Ferrari F2005 photos and Ferrari F2005 pictures
Saturday, 30 July 2011
“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.” -- Thomas Jefferson
My father was a certified public accountant, as is my older brother. I not only lacked any arithmetical skills, I spent much of my early years ignoring the ups and downs of the economy, thinking that these matters were beyond my comprehension. What I failed to understand was that the economy was as much a creature of meddling politicians as economic theories.
I was born in the midst of the Great Depression and have now lived long enough to be caught in a new one. I know that economists and others say we are in a Recession, but it feels like a Depression to me and to the millions of other Americans who are out of work and being laid off weekly. It feels like one to those who suffered foreclosure on their homes. It feels like one every time we go to the supermarket and gasp in disbelief at the cost of groceries.
The unimaginable debt that Americans have incurred by borrowing far too much as a nation and as individuals with credit cards, and the ease with which one could borrow against home equity, has now forced us to deal with the reality of a financial crisis that began in late 2008 when the housing bubble burst.
Historically, it started far earlier when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, elements of the 1930s New Deal, were created to bring “social justice” to the housing market. By the time of the 2008 implosion, they owned more than half of all mortgages issued in the nation.
While the politicians seek to position themselves to blame the other party, the saving grace is that in 2010 voters returned power in the House to Republicans; doing so by electing a large number of “Tea Party” candidates pledged to reduce the debt and reverse what have been the disastrous policies of the Obama administration.
Despite the breathless reporting of the 24/7 news channels, the parade of politicians on both sides explaining their positions, the real news is that Americans are finally engaged in a real debate over the debt and the nation’s future. In 2012 they will vote to change course and, just as European nations that also borrowed too much, they will have to accept austerity measures.
A lot of government programs and, indeed, whole agencies and departments should be ended.
It’s not the death of socialism in America, but it is the recognition that a government that seizes and redistributes the wealth of working Americans must be reversed, revised, and reduced in size and scope.
Too much taxation, too much regulation, too much borrowing, and too much wasteful spending is what the national debate is all about and it is a long overdue debate.
In the land of the brave and the home of the free, Americans want to be free to decide what kind of light bulbs they can purchase, what kind of cars they can drive, and end all the other restrictions that make doing business in America an expensive, unrealistic nightmare.
In a way, the infatuation with a completely unknown, untested, and inexperienced president has been a wake-up call. Barack Obama was packaged to be a celebrity, a “messiah”, when all he really was, was an ill-prepared, standard issue Marxist. He surrounded himself with economic advisors and unvetted “czars” who shared his belief that one last, big push could “transform” a nation that was more in need of a sensible budget than grandiose and failed socialist solutions.
The result was the appalling Obamacare law that attempted to seize twenty percent of the nation’s economy. The House has voted to repeal it. Twenty-six States have gone to court to have it nullified. A Republican president and Senate in 2012 will end it.
Obama and the “green economy” advocates around him have dumped billions into wind and solar energy companies that could not exist without government subsidies coupled with government mandates for their use. Combined, wind and solar provide less than three percent of the nation’s electricity and will never meet its needs.
The nation’s auto industry, once the envy of the world, is almost entirely controlled by the government that, even in the midst of the debt ceiling debate, was being told it must produce lighter, more dangerous automobiles to meet unrealistic demands that they provide more mileage per gallon. You cannot get more energy from a gallon of gasoline than you can from any other source of energy that is ruled by the laws of physics.
Openly scornful of fossil fuels, the Obama administration has rendered the nation more dependent on foreign oil and waged war on coal and now natural gas.
The Obama moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico has wreaked havoc on the oil industry, pursuing the same policies of earlier administrations that have thwarted exploration and extraction of the billions of barrels of U.S. oil that go untapped and unused. Oil rigs have been departing the Gulf to other nations, along with thousands of jobs and millions in the revenue they contributed to the economy. The vast resources of the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge remain off-limits even though only the tiniest part of the refuge would be affected.
We suffered a socialist “stimulus” that stimulated nothing but an increased multi-trillion dollar debt.
I think America has turned an invisible corner and that as soon as we rid the nation of President Obama and his tax-and-spend Democrat supporters in Congress, the nation will begin to correct its borrow-and-borrow-some-more profligate ways. A smaller, less intrusive government may emerge in the years, the decades ahead.
The entrepreneurial energies of Americans will be unleashed if that occurs. The present Recession/Depression will join all the previous ones we have been through. We have all been chastened and we will conclude it wasn’t just Barack Obama’s policies, but decades of socialist policies dating back to the earliest days of the last century.
If that occurs, our children and grandchildren will have the excessive burden of debt lifted from them and American’s energy, innovation, and optimism will prevail.
© Alan Caruba, 2011
Friday, 29 July 2011
Ferrari F430 Spider photos and pictures
Personal Details
Full name : Rachel Anne McAdams
Born on : 17 November 1978
Place of birth : London, Ontario, Canada
Year Active : 2001-Present
Profession : Actress
Height : 5' 5" (1.65 m)
The one of the famous celebrities Rachel Anne McAdams (born November 17, 1978) is a Canadian actress. After graduating beginning a theatre program at York University in 2001, she worked steadily as an actress awaiting finding fame in 2004 with starring role in Mean Girls and The Notebook.Other well-known movies include Wedding Crashers (2005), Red Eye (2005), The Family Stone (2005), State of Play (2009), Time Traveler's Wife, The Time Traveler's Wife (2009), Sherlock Holmes (2009), Morning Glory (2010) and Midnight in Paris (2011).She will become visible in two movies in 2012: romantic drama The Vow with Channing Tatum and an as-yet-untitled Terence Malick film through Ben Affleck, Rachel Weisz and Javier Bardem. She will also build a cameo appearance in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, set for release on December 16, 2011.
| Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, USA | |||
| Year | Award | Category | Result |
| 2010 | Saturn Award | Best Supporting Actress for: Sherlock Holmes (2009). | Nominated |
| 2006 | Saturn Award | Best Actress for: Red Eye (2005/I). | Nominated |
| BAFTA Awards | |||
| 2006 | Rising Star Award | | Nominated |
| Genie Awards | |||
| 2003 | Genie | Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role for: Perfect Pie (2002). | Nominated |
| Hollywood Film Festival | |||
| 2005 | MTV Movie Award | Best Performance for: Red Eye (2005/I). | Won |
| Satellite Awards | |||
| 2005 | Satellite Award | Outstanding Actress in a Supporting Role, Comedy or Musical for: The Family Stone (2005). | Nominated |
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
