| The perpetual Obama campaigning, the endless “pay your fair share” boilerplate, the courting of the 1 percent fundraising elites, the appointment of insider grandees such as Jack Lew, and the presidential aristocratic lifestyle in hard times have made the reformist, egalitarian sermons of 2008 a cruel joke. Utopian dreams of U.N. intervention in arms sales, radical reform of the way food aid is purchased and dispensed, and opposition to Keystone and new federal oil and gas leases have bewildered a lot of Democratic Senate and House members. All of the above takes place in an economy that officially got out of recession almost four years ago, but is in a permanent rut of chronic high employment, continual massive deficits, ballooning debt, radical spikes in entitlement costs, and near-zero percent interest rates. |
Dystopic America: A Paranoid Overview“Two Views of the State of the Nation,” Victor Davis Hanson, National Review |
| The most effective tool in spurring growth is private investment. Obama may not like it, but major investors tend to be well off. They have money to invest. Rather than encourage them to invest in growth and jobs, Obama does the opposite. By raising their taxes and leaving a strong impression he’d like to raise them even more, he discourages investment.In the fiscal cliff deal, Obama not only hiked the top rate on individual income, he increased the tax rates on two incentives to invest, capital gains and dividends. In addition, in Obamacare, he imposed a new tax specifically on investment income. In effect, Obama is waging a war on investment. |
Obama hates investment????“Obama’s War on Growth,” Fred Barnes, Weekly Standard |
| the President who promised to rid the world of nuclear weapons is setting the stage for their greatest proliferation since the dawn of the atomic age. |
Nuclear disarmament=nuclear proliferation???“The Coming Nuclear Breakout,” WSJ |
| Has the great American work ethic suddenly vanished? Doubtful. A more likely explanation for the shrinking workforce is a failing education system that doesn’t give young adults the skills they need to compete in the information economy.Another probable culprit is the rapid expansion of government payments—jobless insurance, food stamps, Medicaid, disability and various tax credits—that provide millions with an alternative income to getting a job. |
Obama’s war on work?????“Making Work Not Pay,” WSJ |
| Back before the clever new notion of “proportional” response became the vogue, our response to Pearl Harbor was ultimately Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And Japan has not attacked or even threatened anybody since then. Nor has any war broken out anywhere that is at all comparable with World War II.Which policy is better? There was a time when we followed the ancient adage “By their fruits ye shall know them.” The track record of massive retaliation easily beats that of the more sophisticated-sounding proportional response.Back in ancient times, when Carthage attacked Rome, the Romans did not respond “proportionally.” They wiped Carthage off the face of the earth. That may have had something to do with the centuries of what was called the Pax Romana — the Roman peace. |
Nuke ‘em all!“Proportional’ Response,” Thomas Sowell, National Review |
| several studies have shown that as industries face increased competition through deregulation or international trade, the gender pay gap shrinks. And the pay gap is larger in monopoly markets without competition and smaller in start-ups and small businesses that must be productive in order to survive. So women need more markets, more enterprise, and more opportunity, not more regulation and litigation. |
Gender gap, what gender gap? Let the market end the gender gap?“77 Cents on the dollar: An unequivocally bogus statistic,” Andrew Biggs, American Enterprise Institute |
Politiscripts, by Richard Roth 