Looking forward from the November election, I have these thoughts, by category. Spiritual It’s hard to imagine a better summary than Randy Alcorn’s article in his Eternal Perspectives Ministries current newsletter. He reminds us that we "vote" every day by our choices and our actions. And that as important as America is, there is an eternal perspective that is even more important. https://www.epm.org/resources/2012/Nov/7/post-election-perspectives/ National Economics How can we not have...
How Government Policy Impacts Our Lives
How Progressives Kill Jobs, Part 2.
Imagine you are the CEO of a large U.S.-based company with operations in several countries. You have to decide whether to keep your company and many of its high-paying jobs in the U.S. in 2013, or move overseas. The move, along with reducing U.S.jobs, would also reduce tax revenue for our local, state and federal governments.You have a lot to consider, but one key issue is the level of taxes that your company must pay. Even if your company retains its home address in the U.S.for another...
How Progressives Kill Jobs. You Can’t Make This Stuff Up.
In this and the next post we will examine two specific ways that our Progressive government destroys jobs by making our businesses more costly than their international competitors. Those added costs reduce profits, thereby decreasing investment and crippling new job creation. Of course when they kill jobs, they also diminish tax revenue for our local, state and federal governments. Every U.S. public company which reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission must now implement a new...
Bond Servants
In The President, which I wrote eighteen years ago, there is an African-American pastor who laments how the federal government has become the world’s largest plantation, keeping Black Americans down. Now, sadly, all Americans of every color are being driven to lives of servitude by and under that same government. The definition of a bond servant in the dictionary is one who works for no wages, often under duress. As I pointed out in the previous post, with today’s level of government debt (no...
I Wish
I wish that Mitt Romney were not a Mormon. I don’t agree with a lot of his faith’s teaching, but every Mormon I’ve known has been a servant-leader, committed to family, decency, and individual liberty. So given all that I will point out below, that is the least important of my wishes. I wish there were fewer extremists in both parties, but now I’m trying to make the best of the actual choice before us this November of Romney/Ryan or Obama/Biden. Along with more centrist Republicans (of which...
How Will the President Grow the Economy from the Bottom Up?
President Obama has recently said that he wants to grow our economy from the “Bottom Up”. But exactly what does he mean, and how does that work? I suppose that he could be promoting the Keynesian saw of giving free money to people who don’t pay income taxes at the bottom (his word) of our economy, so that they will spend it and stimulate demand for more goods. While I personally believe that these efforts over the past four years have only wasted money and increased the interest that...
How To Stop Our Runaway Spending
Conservatives from key states recently voted for subsidies to sugar farmers. Realtors demand mortgage subsidies despite the disaster of the housing finance bubble. Food Stamps are advertised on TV as a “benefit” that you don’t want to miss, and now an astounding one in seven Americans receive this subsidy. Senator Jim Demint of South Carolina tries to represent his state on deepening Charleston’s port, but also his nation on how best to pay for it, without a good outcome so far. How are we...
The Greecehopper and the Ants
For those of a certain age, this Disney video will be familiar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM1DgihKHVI. Please give it a watch. For an individual, household, city, or sovereign nation, it really is not much more complicated than this. With so much practical good sense in the world, from at least the time of Aesop (who was, ironically, a Greek, writing 2,600 years ago), where have we gone wrong? Are we not teaching? Or not learning? And what if there were no ants? See Joseph Shattan’s...
Prohibition Created Criminals and Cost Tax Revenue. So Does The War on Drugs.
The effects of drugs and alcohol can be devastating. In an earlier post (May 18, 2011) we made the case for legalizing drugs as the least bad of all the bad options. If one could purchase drugs like one does alcohol, then all the crime and violence required to create, distribute, and pay for these drugs would instantly disappear. In that post we focused on the micro side, on doing away with the “pusher”, the last one hooked who must then push drugs onto others in order to pay for his or her...
The President’s Credit Rating
The President is out on the campaign trail taking credit for the late, slow, economic recovery that we are finally experiencing. It’s like a delivery room doctor claiming that without him or her, there could be no baby. In fact, to add some extra hyperbole, it’s even worse. Given the President’s steady prescriptions of contraception by regulation, all night binges of spending, and threatened abortion by add-on taxation, it’s a miracle that there is a baby at all. Is it possible that we’re...
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