The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.
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September 8
On September 8, 1883, former U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant drove in the final “golden spike” completing the Northern Pacific Railway in a ceremony at Gold Creek, Montana.
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Video: That Sense of Belonging
Democrats have it — do you?
Credits: h/t Krys Walker … Thanks, Krys!
“Folks, whether the American people believe what I just said or not may be the whole election,” former President Bill Clinton intoned at the Democratic National Convention this week. “I just want you to know that I believe it. With all my heart, I believe it.”
Don’t believe it.
Also not worth believing? Clinton’s television ad, for which, you can be sure, every word was chosen carefully, not just ad-libbed (as some of the gray-haired Lothario’s lines from the convention were said to be):
This election, to me, is about which candidate is more likely to return us to full employment. This is a clear choice. The Republican plan is to cut more taxes on upper-income people and go back to deregulation. That’s what got us in trouble in the first place.
President Obama has a plan to rebuild America from the ground-up — investing in innovation, education and job training. It only works if there is a strong middle class, That’s what happened when I was president. We need to keep going with his plan.
Very persuasive . . . until examined.
Is the current economic depression the result of tax cuts and deregulation? No.
The original implosion was in the mortgage bundle markets, and that was fed by Clintonian homeownership policy and the Federal Reserve’s cheap credit. Regulation had increased dramatically under Bush, and the only bit of deregulation worth talking about was the repeal of Glass-Steagall . . . which Clinton himself signed.
The idea that the prosperity of the Clinton years was caused by his “investment” and “education” and “job training” plans is a howler. Clinton’s era was blessed, instead, with
- a mostly stable Fed policy;
- Republican opposition in the House that forced him to make his most famous policy moves; and
- low gas prices.
This latter was the result of the two most astounding policy moves in the years prior to his administration:
- The Carter-Reagan deregulation of the oil industry; and
- George Herbert Walker Bush’s sending Saudi Arabia and Kuwait the bill for the Persian Gulf War.
Politics, we must remember, is often dominated by expert liars.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Blaming “greedy lenders” or even foolish borrowers begs the question. What institutional factors gave rise to all the foolish lending and borrowing in the first place? Why did the banks have so much money available to lend in the mortgage market — so much indeed that they could throw it even at applicants who lacked jobs, income, down payment money, and good credit?
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Dixy Lee Ray
Beware of averages. The average person has one breast and one testicle.
There’s a man behind a curtain somewhere doing whatever one does to a teleprompter.
Load? Arm? Detonate?
Last week, in Tampa, a Republican teleprompter put words into the mouth of Speaker of the House John Boehner, then chairing the convention, specifically these words: “In the opinion of the chair, the ‘ayes’ have it and the resolution is adopted.”
The resolution concerned whether a number of Ron Paul delegates would be seated. The vote was awfully close. How the actual voice vote turned out was supposed to be for Boehner to judge, not an anonymous guy (or gal) behind the curtain, ghost-writing democracy.
Yesterday, while the Democrats gathered in Charlotte, North Carolina, were busy tucking God and Jerusalem back into their platform, Los Angeles Mayor Anthony Villaraigosa held the gavel. But not control of his own teleprompter.
The resolution restoring those elements to the party’s platform, coming after the platform committee had already completed its work, required a two-thirds vote. When the votes were heard . . . well, Mayor Villaraigosa wasn’t sure. He had the convention vote again. And then again.
Finally, perhaps after seeing the teleprompter, which read, “In the opinion of the chair, two-thirds having voted in the affirmative . . .” he decided, to loud booing, that the resolution had received two-thirds.
As the country prepares (cringes) for the fall campaign, we’ll hear plenty from President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney and about both men. But who cares? The real power in our system of governance, as these conventions make clear, are the guys running the teleprompters.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Dutch Treat
As long as there are taxes, there will be tax avoidance. This turns out to even be true of at least one government operation:
The state-owned Dutch railway company NS has managed to cut its Dutch tax bill by at least €250m since 1999 by routing the cost of new trains through Ireland, the Volkskrant reported at the weekend.
The tax dodge means the treasury has lost out on income generated by a company it owns, the paper points out. The finance ministry, meanwhile, is said to be ‘unhappy’ about the arrangement, which it has been aware of from the beginning.
Through some tricky maneuvering, the NS’s Irish financial wing 
bought trains in Ireland, where taxes are lower, and then rented the new trains to the Dutch public railway. Even though the trains had never run in Ireland.
Ah, the advantages of globalism!
Political posturing then ensued, with talk of “lack of morals” rampant. An economist touted for his expertise on railways charged that the “NS is busy ‘playing at being a company.’ But the NS is not a company but a government service, he said.”
Government service or no, the players at the NS had a very businesslike response, claiming (quite plausibly) that the “tax route” allowed it to “better compete in the market.”
The lesson I draw from this is one some politicians won’t want to hear: High taxes are bad. They cripple enterprise, including government enterprise. When your government operations turn to elaborate tax-avoidance schemes, you should be planning tax decreases. And accompanying decreases in spending.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Yves Guyot, 1910
A law of spoliation may be passed and carried into effect, but in the event of its results becoming permanent, it runs the risk of destroying the government which has assumed the responsibility for it.
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Look in the Backyard
“Social scientists have long tried to determine why some children grow up to be successful adults and others don’t,” fatherhood blogger Kevin Hartnett wrote in the Washington Post. “The causes are hard to untangle.”
Really? I think the causes are pretty obvious. Number one being parents.
Hartnett’s opinion piece was entitled, “What matters more to my kids’ future: Their school or quality time with their parents?” Frustratingly, Hartnett’s not sure, though he “intuitively” feels his two very young sons would gain more benefit from additional time with their parents than a better school.
Harnett and his wife are beginning careers, concerned about the trade-offs between earning higher income to afford the best schools versus providing more parental time at home.
So he turned to several researchers:
- Susan Mayer, author of the book, What Money Can’t Buy: Family Income and Children’s Life Chances, and a professor at the University of Chicago, believes that inexpensive trips to the museum or books in the home are often more important than expensive tutoring or schools.
- “I think it’s very reasonable for parents to choose to work less in order to have more face time with their children,” Professor Annette Lareau of the University of Pennsylvania told Hartnett, “even if that means their children attend a school where they’re not challenged as much as the parents might like.”
- University of California at Irvine Professor Greg Duncan looked at the impact of non-parents on children and concluded, “Schools and neighborhoods might have some effect, but I think it’s pretty clear that a lot more of the action around child development takes place at home.”
The future will be shaped at home, more than at school.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.