One of the great things about our federalist system of government is that each of the states can act as a laboratory for public policy ideas.  The rest of us have the opportunity to watch and learn from the varying degrees of success and failure of the other 49 states and decide if we would like to apply any of these policies to our own community, state, or to the country as a whole. 

In recent years, New York and California have given us case studies in the results of a “tax the rich” policy.  New York has seen a mass exodus of rich people.  The result has been shrinking tax revenues and fewer jobs.  These rich people we love to hate are also job creators.  They own small businesses or portions of large businesses.  These businesses we love to hate also have the distinction of being where people work and get paychecks.  California has given us the extra blessing of seeing what a dual strategy of raising taxes on rich people and increasing regulations on business can produce.  The result:  impending bankruptcy.  California has seen businesses, both large and small, run like Secretariat to states like Idaho, Tennessee, and Texas.  The shrinking tax base means that the government doesn’t have any “makers” left to pay for all the “takers” the welfare state has encouraged.  Most recently, California has been trying to convince its citizens that the mandatory, zero-interest  ”loan” it will be taking from their paychecks isn’t really a tax.

Those of us in the so-called “fly over” states should be left wondering:  with these outstanding examples of failure on both coasts, why would Washington want to pursue the same failing policies for the whole nation?  And yet, what do we hear from the President, Speaker Pelosi and the others?  The same nonsensical policies that has failed New York and caused its liberal governor to tell his fellow Democrats to please leave the rich people alone.  The same nonsensical policies that have failed California twice in the past decade (remember Gov. Grey Davis?).    If you see the guy next to you in the lab burn himself, do you check his notes and then repeat the same process?  Apparently Washington says yes.

check out the following link:

No American should have to choose between health insurance and getting drunk.

….to figure out that the healthcare plan offered by the President is economically insane and will lead to rationing of medical care.  But in case you wanted a Ph.D. to explain it to you, try this.  Marty Feldstien, arguably one of the more distinguished economists alive, explains what should be obvious to anyone whose been paying attention.  Enjoy.

Rep. Maxine Waters has let slip the magic word…socialize (check out the video).  It is her intention to socialize the oil industry.  She is a socialist.  If you don’t have a problem with that, read a history book.  The Liberal agenda (I include Democrats and many Republicans as under the umbrella of Liberal) is open and obvious to all who care to see it.  Socialized medicine, massive welfare programs, increased taxes on the producers, insane new regulations on competition, and now socializing the oil industry…Mao and Lenin would be proud.  We will be poorer and less free as a result.  Don’t say you weren’t warned.

I find it hard to believe a guy claiming to be the victim of systemic white racism when he went from being born in the sticks of West Virginia to Yale, then Cambridge, then teaching jobs at Cornell and Duke, then a professorship at the world’s most prestigious university where he makes hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. I really felt the sting of this systemic white racism when the African-American mayor of Cambridge, the African-American governor of Massachusetts, and the African-American president of the United States, all stated their support for this poor victim.

We are not all the same.  Some cultures are a force for good.  Some are a force for evil.  I know that current PC dogma says that we aren’t supposed to “impose our values” on other people.  But I say if our values involve not raping young girls before we kill them, then our values are intrinsically better and those girls might be better off if we did impose.  In a less than surprising interview, an Iranian militia member has given us just a glimpse into the unadulterated evil that exists in certain parts of the world.  I think sometimes those of us in the West, with our head-in-the-sand view of human nature, either can’t or don’t want to fathom the depths of depravity that humans are capable of.  And when the prevailing culture encourages and enables some to act on that depravity at the expense of others, the result is pure evil.  In Ethiopia, militia men and even tribal leaders mutilate the genitals of young girls.  In Palestine, terrorist cells rape young women, knowing that the girl’s family will murder her as a result (an ”honor killing”) and then tell her that she should, instead of going home to die, strap a bomb to her chest and try to take out some Jews.  The difference in culture is apparent when these young women make their way to an Israeli checkpoint and signal to the soldiers that they have a bomb and the soldiers will attempt to coax her to the ground, dismantle the bomb and get her to a safe place for counseling and a new identification so maybe she can have a life.  One side is good, the other is evil.

Despite what certain politicians might say about how the middle class is poorer and can’t make it anymore, another sign that we are so filthy rich we can’t even see straight:  check out this article about the return of gout.  Yes, that’s right, gout.  A disease historically known only to the rich because of its association with lots of rich foods and alcohol consumption, has made its way to the middle class.  Anyone with a sense of history longer than one week knows that the middle class hasn’t been getting poorer its that they are human and feel poorer because they see rich people around them.  In reality the middle class, and most ofAmerica’s so-called “poor”, have things that were formerly reserved for the uber-rich.  Multiple cars, TV’s (and now satellite TV), home appliances,  and nice vacations are now seen as economic rights.  This is, by the way, the first time in human history when the poor people have been fat.  If you live in America, there is a 99.9% chance that you are not really poor.  So quite crying, unless of course your joints really start to hurt from the gout.

The subtitle of this book, “How Higher Taxes Will Doom The Economy – If We Let It Happen”, is probably a more accurate title to the book, but certainly the chosen title is more eye catching.  The conclusions the authors draw are no shock.  For the economically literate, its hard to avoid the ideas of Art Laffer and Steven Moore’s position at the WSJ and as a commentator make him a known proponent of what some call “supply side economics”.  For me the real value of the book is in its recounting of the past 50 years of economic history.  The numbers are hard to ignore.  Lower taxes create wealth for everyone.  Higher taxes kill prosperity.  For everyone.  Economics is about incentives and when you disincentivize work and entrepreneurship, we will all end up poorer.  A redistribution of wealth won’t work very well if there’s less and less wealth to redistribute.  Why this is so difficult to understand for many on the other side is hard for me to understand.  Overall, the book was pretty good.  If more of us understood some of these simple truths of economic history, I can’t help but think we’d have different election results.

Why haven’t the feminists been outraged at Letterman’s comments about Gov. Palin?  Can you imagine if he had called Rep. Nancy Pelosi or Gov.Granholm a “slutty flight attendant”?

If you want to take a look at what the current economic policies will do for the country, take a look at California.  They’ve had out of control government spending, government intervention into the private sector, and increased taxes for a while now.  Things are going great for them.  Good plan.

How long will it take us to implode like the Soviet Union once the takers finally outnumber the makers?

Is the goal of the Left to eliminate all ups and downs of the business cycle?  Perhaps a flat line is what they are after.  This current situation is not a failure of the free market, it’s the free market showing that there are consequenses for stupid decisions.

Assuming everyone in the Obama administration is a Darwinian evolutionist, you’d think they would be a lot more comfortable with the concept of “survival of the fittest”.

I heard someone on TV say its the past 25 years of economic policy that got us into this mess.  Perhaps they have forgotten that these past 25 years have seen unprecedented economic growth.  Perhaps they have forgotten the high unemployment and high inflation of the 70’s which were started by Johnson and Nixon policies while Ford and Carter continued and exacerbated the suffering.  Perhaps they have forgotten how eerily similar the current policy ideas are to those terrible ideas of yesteryear.

How is the President going to prove that his stimulus “saved” jobs?  What a convenient, unprovable, phrase.  Something tells me the press would not have let George W. Bush get away with that.

In 1989, at the request of Sen. Bob Packwood, the government did a study on how much tax revenues there would be from taxing 100% of the income of certain earners.  The funny part of that is the assumption that people would still work if the government took every last dime they earned.  This illustrates the fundamental misunderstanding of many liberals.  They forget that much of economics is about incentives.  When you tax something, you get less of it.  Politicians know this, that’s why they tax things like tobacco products and alcohol.  So why does the left think its a good idea to tax businesses, health care benefits that businesses provide, savings, and investment?  Aren’t these exactly the things we want more of?