Obama: His Economic Ignorance Knows No Bounds

In response to Bank of America charging a fee for Debit Card users, President Obama said this to ABC News:

This is exactly why we need this Consumer Finance Protection Bureau that we set up that is ready to go," Obama said. "This is exactly why we need somebody whose sole job it is to prevent this kind of stuff from happening. ... You can stop it because if you say to the banks, 'You don't have some inherent right just to - you know, get a certain amount of profit. If your customers - are being mistreated. That you have to treat them fairly and transparently.'"

Keep what stuff from happening? Companies raising their prices to cover the increasing costs of regulation?

Is Obama serious when he claims that companies "don't have some inherent right to ... get a certain amount of profit". They damn sure do have that right and if you, the consumer don't like the prices, then you're welcome to shop elsewhere.

Then theres the last sentence - "you have to treat them [customers] fairly and transparently". What is unfair about banks charging fees for their services? And what is transparent about publically and widely advertising the $5.00 debit card fee?

As John Hideraker observes, "Obama's ignorance of economics is impressive in its comprehensiveness".

Amanda Knox Aquittal: Justice Prevails

John Hinderaker's thoughts
<http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/10/my-thoughts-on-amanda-knox.ph
p> . Very much worth the read. We're so fortunate to live in a country where
the law is practiced largely objectively.

What the Media Hath Wrought

This, from, The National Post <http://www.nationalpost.com/> ,

...the press gave the great American republic an untried,
unknown and, it is becoming more and more frighteningly clear, incompetent
figure as President. Under Obama, America's foreign policies are a mixture
of confusion and costly impotence. It is increasingly bypassed or derided;
the great approach to the Muslim world, symbolized by the Cairo speech, is
in tatters. Its debt and deficits are a weight on the entire global economy.
And the office of presidency is less and less a symbol of strength.

Read the whole article
<http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/09/17/rex-murphy-the-medias-love-a
ffair-with-a-disastrous-president/> - I dare you.

Best Bumper Sticker Ever!

Here's the bumber sticker for the 2012 Republican Voter. Get one here for $5.50.

The People Have Spoken -- The Bastards!

From the Powerline Blog
<http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/09/the-people-have-spoken-the-ba
stards.php> :

"President Obama's approval rating of the American public
has fallen to an all-time low, according to a new Gallup survey ofWhite
House residents and employees.

Fewer the one in 10 Americans earned the president's favor,
according to..."

Hilarious. You really need to read the whole thing.

Green Jobs Are Like Breeding Unicorns to Sell to Chinese Millionaires

Yeah, I think James Delingpole
<http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100102917/green-jobs-wot-
green-jobs-pt-242/> has it just about right.

Military Helicopter Flight Training

A friend of mine from my unit in Vietnam sent this U.S. Army training film of Helicopter Flight Training. When I went through, the program was 12 months beginning at Ft. Wolters, Texas and finishing at Ft. Rucker, Ala.

Boy, does this bring back memories. Some observations:

When one solos for the first time the other candidates really do throw you in a pool. In this case, the pool was at the local Holiday Inn.  I was the 6th candidate in my class to solo (after 9 hours of flight time). Everything about that first flight is etched forever in memory because, when my instructor, Marshall Heckaman, told me to "take it around", we had just completed the day's lesson, but I had been thinking that I was going to be flunked out. The damn thing was impossible to control (or so I thought). I honestly had no idea I had been flying the aircraft virtually the whole time. Those instructors were sneaky.

Instrument flight training was really, really hard. It made me sick because I could not see the horizon and the instructor (knowing this, I think) would throw the aircraft out of trim forcing me to reorient the damn thing. I did well, though and was one of only three guys to get a full instrument flight rating.

Flight training was pretty scary sometimes, but the really scary parts were also the most exhilarating. As you might imagine, we all hungered for the low-level gun runs. In this film, they do a great job of illustrating what it looks like from inside the aircraft. My instructor screamed at me if I ever got above 15' above the ground. Believe me, at 140 knots, 10 feet off the deck with the M60s blazing -- it's like nothing you could imagine.

Third, the eight day exercise was really cool -- especially the night navigation part. You'll see a bit of it toward the end when a guy runs out and lights up a small landing area with 5 or 6 torches. But note that the landing area is illuminated ONLY AFTER the pilot is on close final (i.e., just about to land). Prior to that, we were looking for a light no brighter than that given off by a match flare.

I count those two years (1 year of flight school and my tour in Vietnam) as possibly most formative ones of my life.

Fair Share? What does that mean exactly?

Via The Tax Policy Blog

 

It didn’t go unnoticed, during Obama’s attempt to calm the market, his claim that “fairness” will turn this economy around. What we need, Obama claimed, is for “wealthy Americans and corporations” to pay more in taxes. In other words, we need to equalize the distribution of wealth.

 

Why do lefties like Obama believe this? I can think of two reasons: First, Obama is simply illiterate economically. He really believes that American’s economic  troubles stem from tax rates that are skewed to the poor, i.e., are regressive. That’s fair argument and an economic one for which hard data can be marshalled in its support – or can’t. Consider this:

• Recently released IRS data for 2009, shows that taxpayers earning over $200,000 paid 50 percent of the $866 billion in total income taxes paid that year, or $434 billion. Skeptics will say, "That's because they earn the majority of the income in America. Not so. These taxpayers earned 25 percent of the $7.6 trillion in total adjusted gross income in the country that year.
• The 2009 IRS data also shows that a record 58.6 million tax filers had no income tax liability that year. This means that 42 percent of the 140 million Americans who filed tax returns that year contributed nothing to the basic cost of government.
• Millions of people received cash "refunds" in 2009 even though they paid no income taxes: Some 21 million nonpayers received $27.5 billion in refundable credits from the child credit; Obama's Making Work Pay program gave out $12.8 billion in refundable credits to 32 million filers; The Earned Income Tax Credit program doled out $54 billion in refundable credits to 24.9 million filers; and, nearly 5 million filers received $3.9 billion in refundable Education Credits and roughly 1 million filers got $4.65 billion in refundable credits under the First Time Homebuyers credit program.

What about the corporations, then? Here, also, is an inconvenient truth (at least for Obama and other lefty redistributionists):

• In 2008, the roughly 1,900 largest corporations paid $152 billion in income taxes. This amounted to 67 percent of the $227 billion in total corporate income taxes paid that year.

Second,  Obama, like so many lefty ideologues, is captured by the siren song of equality. To Obama, the presence of inequality is manifest evidence of injustice. As evidence of this is his use of the phrase “fair share”.  But, F.A. Hayak put this argument to bed as follows:

 

From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time

 

This shouldn’t surprise – It’s the quote on this blog’s masthead.