When does cut funding = freedom of speech?

When NPR loses it's government funding. A case can be made for it:

Defund public broadcasting and set it free

[...] This week's brouhaha has underlined the single biggest problem with public broadcasting from the fan's point of view: namely, that with taxpayer financing, no matter how small, inevitably comes political considerations and even outright interference.

[...]

What did Sting teach us? If you love someone, set them free. Should NPR lose its federal funding tomorrow, we would see the mother of all pledge drives, and I would be first in line to contribute. As a friend told me this week, "I would actually start giving them money if they'd stop taking it from me." NPR has one the best media brands in the country; you don't think George Soros would be willing to up his annual contribution to cover the shortfall?

De-coupling from the federal government would allow NPR to sell advertising. Its executives could talk as much trash as they want to about Republicans and Tea Partiers, and few people would care.

We no longer would be subjected to this perennial sideshow and obsequious tip-toeing around political sensibilities. And best of all, at a time when governments at every level are out of money, we wouldn't force taxpayers to fund the listening habits of people who hate them. [...]

I've had my say about this already:

Defund NPR now... and make them more honest

On NPR recently, someone complained that NPR is like a sweater; if you cut government spending, the sleeves will fall off. Well, guess what? Short sleeves are IN this year! I'm sure NPR would adapt, and learn to do more with less like everyone else. Or perhaps even raise revenue in new ways.

In the long run, I think it would work out better for everyone.
     

Mathamatics are not Partisan

The Bush Tax Cuts and the Deficit Myth
Runaway government spending, not declining tax revenues, is the reason the U.S. faces dramatic budget shortfalls for years to come.

President Obama and congressional Democrats are blaming their trillion-dollar budget deficits on the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. Letting these tax cuts expire is their answer. Yet the data flatly contradict this "tax cuts caused the deficits" narrative. Consider the three most persistent myths:

• The Bush tax cuts wiped out last decade's budget surpluses. Sen. John Kerry (D., Mass.), for example, has long blamed the tax cuts for having "taken a $5.6 trillion surplus and turned it into deficits as far as the eye can see." That $5.6 trillion surplus never existed. It was a projection by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in January 2001 to cover the next decade. It assumed that late-1990s economic growth and the stock-market bubble (which had already peaked) would continue forever and generate record-high tax revenues. It assumed no recessions, no terrorist attacks, no wars, no natural disasters, and that all discretionary spending would fall to 1930s levels. [...]

The whole thing is very detailed, exposing each flawed premise being used to blame tax cuts for deficits, and then goes on to clearly demonstrate how it's government spending that's driving up the deficits.

Tax cuts allow people to spend and invest their own money, which stimulates the private sector economy and creates jobs, which creates more taxpayers, thereby increasing revenues also. But if the government continues to spend beyond the revenues they are bringing in, well nothing can "fix" that, other than cutting spending. Raising taxes won't do it because that means less jobs and overall less tax revenue being generated.

It's math, numbers. You can't spend what you don't have, and you can't over-tax or you will reduce tax revenues. The solution: live within our means. Duh.


Related Links:

Why the "Recovery" is stalling

What happens when Tax Cuts Expire in 2011?

Obama's Anti-Business Policies Are Our Economic Katrina
     

Oregon votes to keep it's incumbents

A pro-incumbent year in Oregon

This is supposedly an anti-incumbent year. But not in Oregon. Yesterday nine incumbents in the state legislature won primaries, and in perhaps the most high-profile race of the election -- the Democratic gubernatorial primary -- voters took opting for the incumbent one step further, selecting Democrat John Kitzhaber, himself a former two-term governor (1995-2003), to run for an unprecedented -- and inconsecutive, Grover Cleveland-style -- third term. Kitzhaber’s victory is especially noteworthy, considering his opponent was Bill Bradbury, a popular former secretary of state who saw his more progressive platform shouted down by Democratic voters who chose the “go with what you know” route with Kitzhaber. Too much of that can be bad for democracy. [...]

Are there are more people getting hand-outs than there are taxpayers? I fear Oregon is in danger of catching the California Disease.

We'll see in November.
     

Our Tax Cheat Treasurer has No Plan

Isn't that special? From Neal Boortz:

SO WHERE WAS THE PART WHERE WE GET A PLAN?

Yesterday we were supposed to get the grand financial plan from Obama's tax-cheating whiz-kid Tim Geithner. And what we got was a bunch of grandstanding, but not a lot of details. Here's one good line: "We're will have to try things we've never tried before." Wait! Isn't that what brung us to this hideous dance with all these ugly partners in the first place?

Let's see ... we'll start out by making millions of home loans to people who have no credit, no steady job history, and certainly not enough income to pay the loan back. We'll make these loans to people who should be renters. We've never tried that before on such a large scale .. let's see how that works out for us.

Here's something else we haven't tried before. Let's pass a law - we'll call it the Community Reinvestment Act. This will be a really nifty way for the government to interfere in the free marketplace. We'll set up some urban gangs who can make sure local banks make bad loans to favored minority groups .. or they'll get spanked by the federal government. Let's see how THAT one works out for us.

Once we have those two programs we haven't tried before in place, we'll keep interest rates artificially and illogically low for far too long. Yeah, let's follow this monetary policy that virtually every sane economist not working for the government thinks is a grave mistake because voters like low interest rates. That ought to work out really well.

So now our tax-cheat Treasury secretary wants to try some more things we haven't tried before? Well, you may think that this message brings great hope, but it would seem that the stock market didn't like that one bit.

If you want to see just how this gang of leftist statists want to change this country some new details can be found here.

The reason we don't have more details has to be because they really don't know how the hell they're going to pull this off. It's just going to be stuff we haven't tried before. No chance for letting people work, thrive and then spend their own money.

Bold emphasis mine. After the Berlin Wall fell, Leftists around the world had to face the fact that prosperous and free people would never willingly vote for a hardcore Leftist agenda. Their solution? Make the current system of government unworkable, so it can be replaced with... "something else". I've been hearing people on the far Left saying this for many years. And the parts I've highlighted in Neal's text above shows the ways in which they are doing this.

I don't claim that Obama or even most of the Democrats are consciously doing this, that sabotaging our government is their deliberate agenda. But I believe it is the deliberate agenda of the movers and shakers in the Democrat party, like George Soros. They pull the stings, and they get people elected who will advance their agenda, whether those people deliberately mean to or not.

The financial crisis we are in could have been avoided, by being more conservative with our taxpayer's money, and using traditional common sense in financial matters. Yet overspending Republican's like George Bush also have their share of blame in this too.

I heard Democrat Senator Barbara Boxer on NPR the other day. She was complaining about Republicans opposing the stimulus bill. She said something to the effect of, "Where were they when George Bush was putting us 7 Trillion Dollars over budget?".

Of course she has a point. Yet the fact is, many Republicans DID complain, were very put off by that, and the Republican base has shrunk as a result.

I could be more sympathetic to Senator Boxer if she was truly upset by Bush's overspending. But her attitude seems more along the lines of, "Bush overspent by Trillions, now it's OUR turn to do the same".

I remember when I lived in California, and Boxer was my senator. She couldn't even balance her own checkbook, she was overdrawn HUNDREDS of times.

Where is the Change We Can Believe In? Where is the accountability for our tax dollars? This is Change? I just see the same old Democrat overspending crap, compounding Bush's Republican overspending crap. Our government is SPENDING MONEY WE DO NOT HAVE. Further more, we are having to pay interest on this growing debt.

Just look a California, teetering on the verge of financial collapse. That is the nations future. California is hoping the Feds will bail them out. Who is going to bail the United States of America out? No One, that's who.

I see a major tax payer's revolt in our future. It can't happen soon enough, IMO.
     

"Reality Check" for USA is long overdue

Whether it's passing failing students through the education system and letting them graduate, uneducated and unemployable, or bailing out failing auto industries instead of letting them be replaced with non-failing ones, it's the same thing. Postponing reality only makes your reality check much harsher when it finally, unavoidably arrives.

Postponing Reality

Some of us were raised to believe that reality is inescapable. But that just shows how far behind the times we are. Today, reality is optional. At the very least, it can be postponed.

Kids in school are not learning? Not a problem. Just promote them on to the next grade anyway. Call it "compassion," so as not to hurt their "self-esteem."

Can't meet college admissions standards after they graduate from high school? Denounce those standards as just arbitrary barriers to favor the privileged, and demand that exceptions be made.

Can't do math or science after they are in college? Denounce those courses for their rigidity and insensitivity, and create softer courses that the students can pass to get their degrees.

Once they are out in the real world, people with diplomas and degrees-- but with no real education-- can hit a wall. But by then the day of reckoning has been postponed for 15 or more years. Of course, the reckoning itself can last the rest of their lives.

The current bailout extravaganza is applying the postponement of reality democratically-- to the rich as well as the poor, to the irresponsible as well as to the responsible, to the inefficient as well as to the efficient. It is a triumph of the non-judgmental philosophy that we have heard so much about in high-toned circles.

[...]

Detroit and Michigan have followed classic liberal policies of treating businesses as prey, rather than as assets. They have helped kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. So have the unions. So have managements that have gone along to get along.

Toyota, Honda and other foreign automakers are not heading for Detroit, even though there are lots of experienced automobile workers there. They are avoiding the rust belts and the policies that have made those places rust belts. [...]

It's worth reading the whole thing. Thomas makes an interesting comparison with the horse and buggy industry, and the businesses supporting horses and horse-transportation, that were displaced by the automobile. There were no bail-outs or stimulus packages for them. Somehow, everyone adapted without a diaper-changing government spending tax dollars to keep dying industries going.

People have no respect for "easy" money that they don't earn. Government has no respect for our money, because they don't earn it. The government doesn't need to reform the auto industry (the free market is doing that), the Government itself needs to be reformed. From the WSJ:

Let's 'Restructure' Washington While We're at It
Congress is at least as unresponsive to consumer demand as Detroit.

Congress has been suitably tough in its advice to Detroit, calling for "a complete restructuring" of our failing auto makers. But how about restructuring Washington? The federal government is a giant Rube Goldberg machine that not only wastes hundreds of billions of dollars each year but also burdens local governments and the private sector with legal requirements that no longer serve the public good. Congress should take its own advice and retool Washington. Here's how:

[...]

- Streamline management. The federal government employs about 2.5 million civilians (including the Post Office), about 10 times the number directly employed in the U.S. by Detroit. The bloat is legendary. In his study on "thickening government," NYU Prof. Paul Light found that some government agencies have 32 layers of management, compared to five layers in most well-run companies.

Civil-service rules make hiring an ordeal and firing practically impossible. Rigid job classifications are far more onerous than UAW work rules, guaranteeing massive inefficiency. At many federal agencies, people shuffle back and forth, passing paper from one level to the next, doing nothing useful. Civil service needs to be overhauled.

- Make products that the public wants. Congress is in the business of making and revising laws. But it almost never goes back and reviews unintended consequences. Pick up any volume of the U.S. Code and ask yourself whether the detailed provisions of that law make sense today.

Take something relatively innocuous, like the requirement in the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act to maintain the privacy of patient information. One effect is lots of forms -- over $1 billion worth annually. Compliance also stifles important activity: For example, research on heart-attack recovery at the University of Michigan slowed to a crawl when only one-third of the sample bothered to complete the necessary HIPAA paperwork.

- Enhance competitiveness. Washington's failures are far more significant to the economy than Detroit's. The federal government not only is over seven times larger than Detroit in annual expenditures but it also establishes the legal platform on which the entire U.S. economy operates. The legal infrastructure that Congress has provided is a huge, internally inconsistent mess, requiring businesses, hospitals and schools to negotiate a maze of legal detours. Day-to-day, teachers, doctors, business managers and government officials are unable to make sense of ordinary choices. Law has effectively removed the freedom needed to take responsibility. [...]

There's more suggestions, with examples, it's worth reading the whole thing. One thing they mentioned that I didn't excerpt was farm subsidies. They may well be worth reforming, but I'd be VERY careful about cutting or reforming funding to something as essential as our food supply. But the rest is an excellent comparison of our government to the failing automakers. They suffer from the same problems. Both are strangling from bureaucrats, unions and needless paperwork. In both cases, major reforms are needed.
     

Mortgage bailout = wealth redistribution

When we bought our first house in San Francisco 14 years ago, we bought a small fixer-upper, with a multitude of problems. We could have gotten a mortgage for a better house, but the payments would have been higher, and money would have been too tight if anything changed in our financial situation.

Well we were smart to go with the fixer. Not long after we got the house, Pat was laid off when the hospital he worked for made cutbacks, and a few months later, I was given six months notice that my job at a Law firm was going to be eliminated. If we had bought a more expensive house, we would have lost it.

In the current national situation, we have a small bunch of people (homes in foreclosure are less than 2%), who made bad choices, and now want "the government" to bail them out. "The government" means tax payers like us, home owner's who chose not to live beyond their means, and renters (32% of households) who have also chosen to be careful, and who are often saving up to buy a house that they can afford. Why should WE all be punished for other people's mistakes?



Losing a house to foreclosure is a hard lesson to learn. But hard lessons also have the benefit of teaching people not to repeat the same mistakes again.

Conversely, bailing people out from the consequences of their mistakes, only teaches them that they do not have to consider the consequences of their actions, because "the government", Big Daddy, is going to step in and fix it for them.

And if the government does it even once, it sets a precedent. If they did it last time, why shouldn't they do it again? And again? And again? After all, they did it the LAST time.

How is this fair to the rest of us who were smarter? Since when is it the roll of government to subsidize foolishness? How is it wise to reward the consequences of bad decision making?

And let's not forget that is was the Democrats who pushed and pushed to have bank mortgages made available to people who couldn't otherwise get them, in the name of "fairness". Now those loans have defaulted, and we who were smarter with our money have to subsidize those who weren't? How is that "fair"?

Once again, the Democrats create a problem, then offer themselves as the solution for the problem they created, using our tax dollars, taking money away from people who earn it and spend it wisely, and giving to people who did neither. It's something to remember, when you vote in November.

H.T. to It’s about time: AngryRenter.com