Adventure is worthwhile - Aesop

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Obama has finally been given something other than the usual fluff stuff interview he has been getting away from the MSM for the past 2 years, and it is no surprise it happened to be done by Fox News (video1, video2). He finally sat down with a reporter that was interested in the facts, and Bret Baier grilled his ass. We finally got to see the great orator at work when he wasn’t being handed some softballs by people that get tingles in their legs about him, and Obama, in addition to getting pissed he was not being allowed to just skirt questions with stupid and meaningless talking points, scored, as I expected, a clear F- with his idiotic answers.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Congress is about to use some chicanery they term “Deem and pass” to pretend they voted for a bill, when they did not, so they can push this massively unpopular government healthcare takeover on us stupid peasants that don’t know what’s better for us. Maybe people like me that end up owing the IRS taxes every April should also come up with such a nifty rule where we pretend we send in a check to them, but don’t really do it…

Monday, March 15, 2010

Now this is inspiring:

Chicago’s Urban Prep Charter Academy has a mission—for its students to graduate and succeed in college. Now, for the first graduating class at the high school, it’s mission accomplished.

All 107 seniors were accepted to a four-year college, a significant accomplishment considering they are from one of the toughest neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago.

These are not so-called gifted kids at a private school. The public high school is open to all, choosing students by a lottery.

When they started, only 4% of the kids were even reading at grade level.  So what is the secret of their success?  Something you would not be allowed to do in our “don’t traumatize the kids” public schools.  They made it an all-male school, to eliminate female distractions.  They would not accept excuses, even giving the kids watches so they had no reason to be late to school.  Their schools days are longer and more intense on basic subjects like english, math, science and foreign languages.  The kids wear suits and ties.

And they’re thriving.  Look at the picture in the article, which show inner city kids studying their butts off.  This shows what can be done when you get outside the strictures of the government-run system.  The kids are the same, the teachers are the same.  It’s the culture that’s the difference.  The school is focused on discipline and education, not self-esteem, not the latest technological gizmos and not politics.

Just think what could happen if the millions of dedicate teachers in our country were liberated like this.  It doesn’t all have to be ties and discipline.  With suburban kids, a more relaxed environment might be fine.  The point is freedom, the ability of a school to find what works rather that stick to some Five Year Plan dictated from on high.

On the flip side, we have the travesty that went down this week in Texas.

After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.

The vote was 10 to 5 along party lines, with all the Republicans on the board voting for it.

A liveblog of the meeting can be found here.  This is the school board that, until next year, is lead by Don McLeroy, the young earth creationist who has proclaimed that his science vision comes from the Bible and “someone has to stand up to the experts.”

There’s stuff in their changes that I think is appropriate, actually.  The idea that Republicans helped the Civil Rights movement enrages liberals, but it happens to be true.  Before they welcomed disaffected segregationists into the party under Nixon, the GOP was actually stronger on Civil Rights than the Democrats.  A larger percentage voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for example.  I also think that it is entirely appropriate that Hayek and Friedman be added to the economics curriculum that includes Marx, Keynes and Smith.  Hayek and Friedman are the two most influential economists of the last half century while Marx is a joke.

On the other hand, the removal of Thomas Jefferson from the Enlightenment and the attempt to expurgate the separation of church and state is simply bullshit.  They are also trying to vindicate Joseph McCarthy because nine of the 159 people he accused of being Communists were implicated in the Venona transcripts.  This has been a pet cause of certain conservatives lately, Mann Coulter in particular.  It is, of course, ridiculous.  McCarthy was known to throw accusations in every direction, especially at political foes, and created a climate of fear in which a mere accusation could destroy someone’s career.  That there were real communist traitors in our midst did not excuse that.  If anything, McCarthy damaged the efforts to root out the traitors by throwing baseless accusations at such as General George Marshall.

But I think people miss the point of this story.  This wouldn’t be a problem if we didn’t have such tight government control of the schools.  Granted, some idiots would be teaching their kids garbage in home schools or religious private schools.  But the damage would be limited and the debate far less vociferous.  Some liberals, notably our President, want national standards.  But that just expands the problem.  What happens if some religious nutbag gets into the White House?  What happens if a liberal ideologue like Cornell West or Noam Chomsky gets control?  We had this debate in the 90’s, when Clinton proposed a standard that was highly liberal.  The temptation to inject political views into school standards is simply too strong to resist, especially for the kind of people who gravitate to government.

The Urban Prep Charter Academy shows the best that we can get in education.  Last week’s travesty in Texas shows the worst.  Think about which we should be moving toward.  And think about which our President is moving toward.

Saturday, March 13, 2010

Matt Welch has one of the better lines I’ve seen on the budget crises going on all over the country.  Responding to an NYT article that asks if school taxes can be cut in a district with an average teacher salary of $97,000, he cries out:

Let’s see, is this mic on? Can I get a little more reverb? Good. WE ARE OUT OF MONEY, ASSHOLES.

Not only that, but we are out of money because YOU STOLE IT, FROM THE CHILDREN. And the rest of us.

According to the linked story, activists are claiming that the local school district spends $27,500 per student. While we don’t know whether that’s precisely true (shoot, why would you print the real per-student cost, in the newspaper article about controversies over school spending?), even if that number is half the size it’s a big blinking neon WTF.

He goes on to point out the perpetual budget cycle, which works like so:

(1) Economy does well, tax revenues boom;

(2) The government spends all the new money, raising the budget to unsustainable levels;

(3) Economy turns down, revenues fall (both 1 and 3 are exacerbated by our heavily progressive tax system);

(4) Even tiny cuts in bloated budgets are decried as “draconian”; raise taxes.

(5) Wash, rinse, repeat.  Occasionally wonder why businesses and rich people are leaving the state/country.

I must say, I am getting closer and closer the primal scream Welch makes.  And I think a lot of Americans are getting there, too.  I recently was talking to my mother, who asked if Obama knows that there’s a limit to the amount of money he can spend.  I don’t think he does.  I don’t think any of them do, Republican or Democrat (but especially Democrat).  They are so used, since the Long Boom began under Reagan, to government revenue always being there.  The idea that we could run out of money is something that simply doesn’t compute.  It’s like watching cave men trying to understand quantum mechanics (no, Oog, use the Schrodinger equation, not the spear).  They are vaguely aware of some concern about this “deficit thing” out there.  But they don’t really grok it.  If they did, we wouldn’t be having debates about the brutality of one quarter of one percent salary cuts.

Friday, March 12, 2010

Here is how the economics behind government takeover of healthcare proposed in the current monstrous bill congress is going to pass against the will of the people by means of a gimmick, works. Obama’s congress proposes a monster that will cost close to $2 trillion over 10 years and gives government absolute and total control of all things healthcare. Even more frightening, the bill is set up in such a way that by that decade’s end everyone will have been funneled into a government controlled plan. People freak out. So Obama then tells congress they need to find a way to make it happened for a measly $900 billion to make the number more palatable. The congress then proceeds to concoct a scheme that charges you taxes over 10 years to come up with some $1.8 trillion dollars the CBO projected optimistically will be the cost of their behemoth takeover plan, but then offers no care whatsoever for the first four or five years. This then allows them to collect some $850 billion dollars in extra cash during that first 10 year stint, leaving us with a plan that they tell us will now only cost us a measly $1 trillion! Presto, healthcare costs are under control! I should mention that this $1.8 trillion CBO score is for the best case scenario cost of a government healthcare takeover, but we all know that as things go, these collectivist scams usually cost orders of magnitude more than was projected by the biggest pessimists, when they go live.

So after the first 10 years of Obamacare comes to a close, and we roll into the next decade of this wonderful collectivist experiment, we suddenly have government controlled healthcare that is at a minimum underfunded by $850 billion dollars for the next ten years, and likely to be behind a couple of trillion already too. Yet they and the MSM are all claiming this bill will save us money! Maybe they know that the collectivists elite in charge and pushing this plan through even though we don’t want it plan to confiscate our paychecks in their entirety and then distribute to us each according to our needs eventually, and then this stuff wont matter much. Barring that, you can fill in the gaps how they plan to deal with the vanishing of the “savings” they are now tauting sooner than later.

The recent revelation that came out, after some massive stonewalling by the WH which obviously knew it was damning, that many of Obama’s top legal appointees, including Eric Holder over at Justice, seem to have a conflict of interest when it comes to terrorism, seems to have lit a fire in the legal community. Whether you feel that there are issues with the whole terrorists are enemy combatants that purposefully avoid any uniforms or identifications vs. terrorist are just criminals, you can not fail to grasp that there is something problematic with having the very people that are now in charge of preventing another terrorist attack being sympathetic to that cause. And before you lambaste me for saying this, remember that, as this Andrew C. McCarthy article points out, these attorneys chose to go represent people that wanted to destroy this country, and we should be able to ask why. Especially when, as I pointed out, several of these attorneys are now the ones making critical decisions on how to handle not just captured terrorists, but how and how timely we get intelligence from these captured terrorists that can protect Americans from another attack. Here is the money quote:

The Justice Department lawyers who represented al-Qaeda were volunteers. Of all the causes to which they could have donated their services, they chose our enemies. They are no doubt sincere in claiming they sought to vindicate principles, not terrorists. But the other stubborn fact is that, since they took the helm at Justice, counterterrorism policy has become much more terrorist friendly.

Anyone that tries to make the case that those people asking for clarifications and pointing out the conflict, are just ushering a new era of McCarthyism, demanding we ignore the consequences and impact of the policies implemented by, and the actions taken by these lawyers now making the decisions to treat terrorists like common criminals, or worse tries to make the case that these policy shifts have made us safer, is an outright liar or moron. Maybe even both. I can guarantee you that the people that say this is much ado about nothing and that anyone that points out that these lawyers once chose to defend terrorists, would be singing a different tune if we had a clear conflict of interest like this with some government appointee that had links to the private sector. There is no excuse, and this is based on their won words and actions, even when you think that capitalism is a bigger threat than terrorism, to pretend that there isn’t a clear issue here. The truth is that these lawyers have made us all less safe. We have been lucky so far, but that luck won’t hold.

Update: It now looks like Holder wasn’t as forthcoming about his whole role in this and is now being looked at for failing to turn over briefs that would have been cause for concern. Oh, I am sure they will say it was an oversight, in fact they already are, nut what a convenient oversight huh? This is the mastermind that wanted to bring the terrorist show trials to NYC after all. The point is that Holder and his posse have an agenda, and that agenda makes plays havoc with our security. The left’s way of silencing those pointing this out is to accuse them of wanting to slime the lawyers for defending terrorists when the point is that these lawyers chose to defend the terrorists to undermine those that took terrorism seriously and treated this like a war and them like combatants.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Man, are they getting desperate, or what?  via Mish:

A federally funded ticketing blitz in the state of Virginia landed a total of 6996 traffic tickets this weekend. The blitz, dubbed “Operation Air, Land & Speed” coincided with frantic efforts by state officials to close a $2.2 billion budget deficit. Supervisors ordered state troopers to saturate Interstates 81 and 95 to issue as many tickets as humanly possible over the space of two days.

Jesus--the state police actually treated this like a got-damn military operation, and all because the state government has a hole in their budget the size of Obama’s ears. 

This is sheer desperation, plain and simple.  When you have to resort to traffic tickets to shore up your budget, it’s game-fucking-over.  And the most grotesque aspect of this whole mafia-style skim is that it was federally funded.  In other words, our tax dollars went to pay for this. 

Why are they resorting to measures like these?  A quick reminder:

Watching these states try to grapple with their underwater budgets is like watching a car wreck in real time.  You know it’s not going to turn out well, but you can’t look away.  Ponzi government is coming home to roost, kids.

Yesterday, while the AE-35 was on the fritz, I went out to check my snail mail and found something most curious—a letter from the Census Bureau.  I figured I’d take it in, write down “we got three here” with one of my daughter’s crayons and send it back.  But it was not my census form.  It was, instead, a stupid letter telling me to expect my census form soon.

Dear Resident,

About one week from now, you will receive a 2010 Census form in the mail.  When you receive your form, please fill it out and mail it in promptly.

Your response is important.  Results from the 2010 Census will be used to help each community get its fair share of government funds for highways, schools, health facilities, and many other programs you and your neighbors need.  Without a complete, accurate census, your community may not receive its fair share.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Sincerely,
Robert M. Groves
Director, U.S. Census Bureau

Emphasis mine.

This little letter probably cost the Feds about $42 million.  That estimate is based on just postage, paper and labor.  But the government can’t wipe it’s ass for less than six grand, so I’ll assume that’s a lower limit.

To be honest, the cost doesn’t me.  $42 million is about what the government spends every five minutes.  Obamacare will probably spend ten times that much designing their logo.  The Census is already budgeted at ... holy shit ... $14 billion (three times the cost of the 2000 census) so complaining about the cost of this letter is like complaining about the font on the Stimulus Bill.

Moreover, the Bureau claims that these letters could save up to $500 million. The reason is that even a small increase in response rates will erase the need to send actual people out to chase up respondees, a process that is very expensive at government labor rates (they’re already hiring 750,000 people for it).  We all know how reliable the estimates are for government money-saving efforts, but this actually doesn’t seem too unreasonable to me.

So, no, I’m not bothered by the cost.  What got my boxers in a bunch was the phrase I’ve highlighted in bold.  I’m not happy with the Census Bureau telling us to fill out the form because it’s the only way to get out “fair share” of government lucre.  That is classic liberal redistributionist trope.

It’s also bullshit.  As we have seen with the stimulus and with the buying of healthcare reform, government money gets out doled based on politics, not need and certainly not the damned Census.  Did Louisiana get a $100 million payout in the healthcare bill because the filled out their Census forms?  No, they got it because Mary Landrieu sold her healthcare vote.  Are two-thirds of the stimulus jobs going to public education because of the census? No, they’re going there because education is the province of the nation’s most powerful unions.

Now this is my first time filling out a census form.  I was living with my parents in 1990 and was a vagabond grad student in 2000.  Perhaps the letter has always said this.  But even if this is standard Census boilerplate, I don’t like it.  We should not be encouraging people to think of government as giant bag of money from which you get your “fair share”.

Democrats ran and won in 2006, and then again in 2008, on the bad behavior of republicans. Republicans were successfully and correctly painted as having lost their fiscal sanity for the deficit spending prior to 2006, only to have democrats gain control of congress and the spending purse after the 2006 elections, and set new spending records they then blamed Bush for. The leftwing machine’s manipulations of the facts, with big-time help from a complicit media that didn’t point out democrats were always worse at that stuff anyway when in charge, allowed them to run on the lack of fiscal responsibility of the republicans in 2008 again, using the crisis of their own making that they then blamed on Bush yet again, to win big, only to then proceed to set new deficit spending records. Here is the graph for those of you that want to dispute the deficit spending facts, so spare us the bull:

As this projection showed Obama’s deficit spending in his first year ended up being more than all 8 years of Bush. Oh sure, as I already pointed out Obama is blaming Bush for having to do so. Democrats have successfully convinced so many that the financial crisis we are in isn’t tied to those idiotic collectivist economic lending practices they forced upon the market in the last 3 decades. Even worse, they successfully have covered up the rigged games Franks and Dodd set up with Fannie and Freddie to keep those faulty economic policies afloat, and how those trading scams then led to the implosion of the housing market and then the financial sector. But that “It’s Bush’s fault” excuse is wearing thin as people are slowly seeing the truth. Almost $2 trillion of the tax payer’s dollars has been funneled to democrats and their friends, through one collectivist economic scam or another promising salvation, but delivering nothing but a drastically growing government bureaucracy, while the private sector continues to bleed jobs and contract. And the WH remains focused on tacking on trillions more in new taxes and debt so they can give government control of healthcare moneys and decisions, with a scam which purports to reign in costs and be fiscally responsible by of all things taxing us for 10 years to provide 5 or 6 years of coverage, while ignoring the economic disaster they are leaving in their wake. And the one thing they should be addressing, the lack of jobs, gets nothing but some meaningless political play. In the mean time the hole is growing deeper and the spending of money we simply don’t have continues to rise. This year is looking like it will set even higher and wasteful deficit spending records as this February’s $220.9 billion single month record is showing. This seems to be our economic future thanks to the democrats and their economics. But the fact that democrats are destroying our economy, and are trying hard to destroy healthcare, is not the thing I want to address here. I want to talk a bit about one of the other lies they told to get themselves elected.

If you have been following the whole Eric Massa fiasco, you know this stuff has turned into a soap opera writ large. Frankly I do not know if Massa is telling the truth. He is a democrat after all, and lying is second nature for them. However, I do not put it past this WH to do what Massa has accused them of doing either. Based on what I have seen them do in just this first year, I have no doubt that this bunch is probably the most corrupt crew I have ever seen. We are dealing with Chicago politics here, and this – hope & change! - is SOP for these people. My bet is that since Obama wants this monster passed, his team is going to make it happen. Even if they have to do what Massa has accused them of. In fact I do not put it past them to resort to openly committing felonies to do so considering the vested interest they have in making this the law of the lad. After all, they control the levers of power and the press, so whose gonna be able to do anything about anything bad they do? If the stuff that has been going on so far hasn’t made the case yet, I doubt anything they do will.

And that brings me to my point about this whole Massa thing. If you don’t remember Nancy promising to drain the republican swamp and end the culture of corruption back in 2006, here is just one of the instances the sympathetic press gave her words play. Unfortunately, as case after case proves – Chris Dodd, Barney Franks, Charley Rangel, and a plethora of others – Nancy lied, and the corruption and criminal behavior, like the deficit spending and the fiscal irresponsibility I talked about before, is also setting new records. Don’t take my word for it. The case with Massa is more of the same. Even more important is the fact that while Pelosi is now claiming ignorance that’s a blatant lie because Nancy knew months ago about Massa’s behavior. And while Nancy is playing dumb, just a little research would have made it all obvious from records going back to Massa’s NAVY days showing that Massa was a time bomb waiting to explode.

As is the case in all these other stories of corruption that the MSM is ignoring or down playing, we are being lied to by these democrats that want to pretend real criminal activity and serious ethics violations, stuff that makes what happens when the republicans were in charge look tame, isn’t their modus operandi. And keep in mind that it is this scandal driven congress which is ignoring the will of the people and pushing forward with an unpopular government takeover of healthcare. Why isn’t the MSM up in arms about all this corruption and the will of the people being ignored? I guess that’s more of that hope and change for you.

I’ve not posted much of the reconciliation issue and whether Congress will use reconciliation to bypass the filibuster on healthcare reform.  I’m not overly fond of fillibusters, but this seems like a sneaky way to get an unpopular bill through.  I’m fully aware of the political games going on.  The GOP wants a victory over the Democrats.  The Democrats want a bill passed, no matter what’s in it.  And if the roles were reversed, I’m sure the Republicans would be screaming about the minority “thwarting the will of the people” and the Democrats would be sobbing about our “sacred Senate traditions”.  To me, the most important fight right now is in the House.  If Pelosi can’t even muster a majority—and it’s iffy—this thing is deader than Michael Jackson.

Still, it’s nice to have some facts on the subject. And for all the Democrat screeching about how Republicans have used reconciliation “all the time”, the facts belie this claim:

Almost every act passed under reconciliation (8/15) has in fact been a budget bill.  And most of those that weren’t (5/7) were tax bills.  The two outliers:  The 1996 welfare reform act and the 2007 student aid package.  Why those were passed under reconciliation isn’t made clear.

What’s also interesting is that the vast majority of these bills were absolute slam dunks.  Most (8/15) were passed by filibuster-proof supermajorities, meaning that reconciliation wasn’t used as an end-around to avoid a cloture vote.

There are only seven times in the last thirty years that reconciliation has been used to bypass the supermajority requirement and all seven were budget bills.  Those bills were:

(1) Ronald Reagan’s 1982 budget, which raised taxes and cut Medicare spending.

(2) George Bush’s 1990 budget, which raised taxes and cut spending.

(3) Bill Clinton’s 1993 budget, which raised taxes and cut spending (passed on Gore’s tie-breaker).

(4) George Bush’s 2001 tax cut (which was supported 58-33).

(5) George Bush’s 2003 tax cut.

(6) George Bush’s 2005 spending cut bill.

(7) George Bush’s 2005 tax cut.

The Lefties are mad because reconciliation was used to pass tax cuts they didn’t like.  And maybe ... perhaps ... they have a point on that.  But Bush did not use reconciliation to pass Medicare Part D or to start the Iraq War or to reform Social Security or pass the Patriot Act or anything else.  They have been crowing that welfare reform was passed by reconciliation.  But welfare reform was supported 78-21 in the Senate and 328-101 in the House.  It could easily have gotten cloture.  The most likely reason reconciliation was used was to fix the Medicaid budget adjustments and get a bill through that Clinton wouldn’t veto.

Tuesday, March 09, 2010

That’s the title of this post, which argue that GM’s recent decision to spare six hundred dealerships from the axe makes them the USPS of cars.

The main reason that the USPS will never make any money is that it can’t get rid of its infrastructure.  It must have a post office in every district and letter carriers visiting every house six (soon to be five?) days a week.  They can’t get rid of their post offices because Congress pays the bills, and no congressman is willing to let their post office get shut down.  They won’t give up universal delivery because their unions, who help elect those congressmen, don’t want to give up those jobs with, say, requiring rural people to come into town to pick up their mail, like they do their groceries and sundries.

...

Now that Congress has similar control over Government Motors, are we seeing the same political pressure take hold in that firm?

GM is claiming they are acting in good faith, that the restored dealers were found to be necessary.  Maybe they’re telling the truth but the problem with a government-owned car company is that no one believes it.  There has certainly been political pressure brought on Congress and the White House to stop some of these closures.  And you have to wonder if those 661 reprieves are more connected with politics than economic reality.

Are we going to see the day when GM and Chrysler will tell the government that, like the Post Office, they plan to lose $200 billion over the next decade?  We can’t be very far from it. And is this the way healthcare is going to play out down the road?  That hospitals will issue special dispensations for those who complain enough to Congress?

This is why I hate getting the government involved in things.  It contaminates everything, it muddies the waters, it makes motives unclear.  Enough already.

Sunday, March 07, 2010

New Jersey is in a bad way, fiscally.  $2 billion in the fiscal hole.  Chris Christie is trying to dig them out by cutting spending.  But since there is no such as unpopular spending, he’s getting pilloried.

He’s not backing down. Here are some highlights of a speech he gave to the Jersey mayors:

You know, at some point there has to be parity. There has to be parity between what is happening in the real world, and what is happening in the public sector world. The money does not grow on trees outside this building or outside your municipal building. It comes from the hard working people of our communities who are suffering and are hurting right now.

I heard someone in the legislature say two days ago that they wanted no fare hike in New Jersey Transit, no cuts in service, and no cuts in subsidy. And I was thinking to myself, man I should have made this guy treasurer. [Laughter] Because if you can pull that one off, you’re obviously magic.

...

There’s no time left. We have no room left to borrow. We have no room left to tax. So we merely have room left now, to do this. We are all reaching the edge of a cliff. And it reminds me a bit of that part of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where the had a seminal decision to make. So what did they do? They held hands and they jumped off the cliff.

We have to hold hands at every level of government, state county, municipal, school board. We have to hold hands and jump off the cliff.

Read the whole thing.

This is a governor confronted by fiscal reality trying to do his best to get the house in order.  Eventually, something like this is going to have to happen on the federal level.  The question is: is there anyone out there who can take on Medicare, the elephant in the room?  Or will we get more Obama-style accounting gimmicks and vague promises?  Neither party is giving me hope.  The only man out there talking about the debt seriously is Paul Ryan and the GOP is backing away from him as fast as it can.

I’m actually slightly more optimistic after reading Christie’s remarks and the reaction to them.  The chattering class is appalled that he would have the temerity to cut government programs that consist of something other than “waste, fraud and abuse”.  But everyone with an IQ higher than their shorts size knows that this has to be done.  I see what’s going on in New Jersey (and to an extent, in other states) as the beginning of the fiscal revolt that has begun in this country.  At some point, that revolt will reach Washington.  We simply have no choice anymore.

Friday, March 05, 2010

In the last few years, numerous people have noted not only the huge difference between federal and private pay scales, but the huge rise in federal pay scales over the last decade.  The standard response of the federal employees is that they’re doing sophisticated high-level work while the rest of us—apparently—make a living breaking rocks into gravel.  So of course, we make less.

Bullshit says USA today:

Federal employees earn higher average salaries than private-sector workers in more than eight out of 10 occupations, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data finds.

Accountants, nurses, chemists, surveyors, cooks, clerks and janitors are among the wide range of jobs that get paid more on average in the federal government than in the private sector.

Overall, federal workers earned an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for occupations that exist both in government and the private sector, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The average pay for the same mix of jobs in the private sector was $60,046 in 2008, the most recent data available.

These salary figures do not include the value of health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008 vs. $9,882 per private worker, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

They have a chart showing the breakdown.  The NTEU union head continues to claim that this is unfair.  She’s now found a fallback position of claiming that while the job titles are the same, the federal jobs are harder.  To some extent, this may be true.  The federal public relations manager making $132,000 certainly has a tougher job defending useless government programs than a private sector PR flack making $88,000 for the same job.

However, as Chris Edwards, the Cato scholar who has been pilloried by fed pay apologists, notes:

One reason I’ve been suspicious of the official gap claim is that while Bureau of Economic Analysis data show that average federal wages have grown far faster than private wages in recent years, the official “pay gap” has remained very high. In 2001, the pay gap was said to be 22 percent. By 2008, the gap was said to have increased to 25 percent.

Yet BEA data show that average federal salaries rose 46 percent between 2001 and 2008, much more than the 26-percent average increase in the private sector. Since the BEA data are extremely solid, there must be something wrong with the official pay gap methodology.

In other words, the more we increase federal salaries, the more the federal employees claim they’re getting shafted.

It should be noted that these disparities are not as strong at the state and local level (except, I would suspect, in California).  This is because it’s harder to throw money at government employees when the taxpayers are within protest marching distance.

The most ominous part may be the disparity between government and private sector benefits.  Those benefits include pensions, a massive unfunded liability that is set, as I noted in an earlier post, to bankrupt the country.

Thursday, March 04, 2010

With a caveat that the sequel is rarely as good as the original....

I wanted to follow up on Hal’s post from a couple of days ago on the financial turmoil that’s been going on in Greece.  This has been an object of somewhat obsessive attention over at Zerohedge the past few weeks, and the focus has largely been on the similarities between this and what happened when TARP was being debated.  While I can certainly see this as applied to a continental rather than national scale, I think the implications here are far greater.

In my opinion, what is going on in Greece marks it as a bellwether on the survivability of the EU in the short-term, and the welfare state in the long-term. The EU has two choices--1) come up with some sort of bailout plan for a member nation who, economically speaking, is something of a red-headed stepchild due to its lack of economic diversity (most jobs in Greece are in government or tourism); or 2) tell them “Sorry, we can’t throw good money after bad,” and Greece ends up leaving the EU to go back to a vastly devalued Drachma.

If the EU picks the first option, it’s going to open the floodgates.  Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Ireland are all in way over their heads in government debt, with France, the UK, and Germany not too far behind.  It will be impossible for the more stable members of the EU to justify denying bailouts to the the other PIIGS, when they spent all this time agonizing over how to fix the problem and came up with a bailout as the way to fix things.  The “austerity measures” put in by Greece are a joke, because it doesn’t change the fundamental culture of entitlement that’s infected the populace, so they’ll likely end up having to come back to the trough again in a year or so begging for more.

If the second option is chosen, what motivation would Greece or the other PIIGS have to stay in the EU?  The whole idea behind the EU was to create an economic superpower that could compete with the US and Russia for global trade.  If the EU won’t prop up a member of its own economic alliance, why should Italy or Spain or Portugal bother staying in?  Better to just cut loose and try to figure things out on their own without subjecting the country’s citizens to endless agonizing uncertainty on the economic direction of the nation.

Either way, count on what happens with Greece to eventually filter over to the United States at some point.  As Hal pointed out, Greece’s welfare state, like most European nations, is quite robust and the populace has come to depend on entitlement programs--specifically, the national pension system--as their means of survival.  In the same way, Social Security, Medicare, and pension systems here in the US are seen as necessary by most Americans--an entitlement that comes with putting money into a system and expecting financial compensation at a later date.  The problem is that these programs have finally reached the breaking point of sustainability.

Why?  Check out these graphs, the first from Zerohedge and the second from Mish:

Peter Suderman has a great little post looking under the hood to see how the CBO estimates how many jobs the stimulus “created or saved”.  He explains that those jobs are not so much created or saved as “wild-ass guessed”.

That’s because CBO’s estimates are generated using models that significantly boost the figures provided by existing measurements (measurements which themselves have been called into serious question). To some extent, that’s understandable—determining how many jobs would exist in the absence of a policy is impossible to do with any certainty; no matter how good your models, building a counterfactual is always a guessing game. But it’s also a game that’s awfully easy to rig, or at least tilt in your preferred direction.

That’s especially true when estimating government spending’s productive effects, which is accomplished by plugging numbers into a formula that assumes that government spending produces a multiplier—an increased return for every government dollar spent. In other words, it extrapolates from how much money is put in rather than from what has actually come out. And it does so using a formula that dictates that if money is put in, even more money will come out. According to the CBO’s estimates, depending on how the money is spent, one dollar of government spending can produce total economic activity of up to $2.50. What a deal!

To be it even more succinctly: the CBO has an economic model. They plug spending into that model and it predicts how many jobs were created. There is no actual measurement of how many jobs were created.  This is like studying global warming entirely with computer models and not using actual temperature records (insert Climategate jokes here).

To be fair, CBO acknowledges this explicitly in their reports.  But Obama and his media dog-washers conveniently ignore this fact.

There’s another point I’d like to make about the stimulus while I’m at it.  Recently, Obama’s defenders have been claiming that the stimulus saved us from Great Depression II.  The argument, according to the likes of Joe Biden, is that we’d be in breadlines had it not been for the stimulus.  I could cite various libertarian think tanks and pundits to argue this point.  But why do that when I can use the administration’s own arguments to refute them?

Here is the now infamous unemployment graph that was used to justify the stimulus:

Ignore, for the moment, how wrong their predictions were and concentrate on the predictions themselves. The stimulus was not sold to us as preventing an economic apocalypse: you can see that the “without recovery plan” line peaks and settles back down.  It does not go off into 20-25% Great Depression Land.

It was TARP that was sold to us as preventing an economic apocalypse, not the stimulus.  Whether TARP did this or not, I don’t know.  There are enough economists I respect who believe TARP prevented a meltdown that I’ll concede that this might be the case.

But the stimulus was never about saving the economy.  The stimulus was about easing the pain of the recession.  The justification was that, for a small sacrifice in long term prosperity, we would reduce the short-term economic suffering.  We could keep unemployment reasonable and take the edge off the recession.

Of course, that didn’t happen.  So what do you do if you’re a desperate Obama supporter? Move the goalposts and muddy the waters.  Since the stimulus demonstrably failed to keep unemployment under 8%, toss your previously ultra-reliable CBO-approved economic forecast and make a wild claim that a million government jobs and a couple of percentage points of GDP are all that stood between us and the abyss.  And hope that, in the confusion, people mix up TARP and the stimulus enough to claim that you’re right.

Well, you can’t blame them for trying.  Especially with such on obeisant Left Wing Echosphere.