Uncle Sucker

I guess the Obama campaign is promoting a video that shows a composite character “Julia” who starts getting government programs from age 3 to retirement.  It’s backfired.  It merely serves to remind most of us how crazy cradle-to-grave security is. 

Here’s to hoping that Julia is not like the woman that Obama put in his autobiography.   Now he says she wasn’t real, just a “composite girlfriend”.  Mom and I  looked at one another quizzically.  She finally responded, “What does that tell you about a guy who writes an autobiography and puts fabrications in it?” Well, I don’t know.  Maybe that is why the real girlfriend finally surfaced and said he was cold and aloof and guarded.  When she told him she loved him he said, “Thank you.” And then followed with something about how he could understand why she did.  That’s either cold as ice or dumb statement.  Dumb like when the weatherman Sunday night was following that tornado cell nearing Ponca City.  You know how they do it--showing radar maps, talking to some insane spotter trying to get closer to the twister, giving grave warnings about seeking shelter.  Then the tornado began to dissipate and he pronounced, “Now I wouldn’t get too relieved just yet since there is still persistent circulation.  Stay in your shelter for a while longer.”  I guess that statement was for the guy who really likes a comfortable tornado shelter complete with television service so he is watching the TV weatherman.  You know, big Lazy Boy, Slurpie in one hand and Big Mac in the other—so if you get blown away, they’ll say how you really enjoyed life.

Where was I?  Ah, Julia.  Julia gets all the state has to offer from little on.  It didn’t remind me of anything admirable.   It reminded me of the kids in our local group home and how growing up a system kid affected them.  Orphan kids had all they needed to eat and could constantly watch TV (the babysitter).  The state would take them on day trips to Frontier City and the Warren Center Ice rink.  They even had Slurpies and big Macs. 

They just didn’t have Mom and Dad.  And there was nothing on the face of this planet they wanted worse.  One kid grieved that he had blown a placement with a family that sounded downright like hillbillies.  Didn’t matter.  He wanted what the state didn’t have: Love, Encouragement, Someone to follow around, Somebody to eagerly get involved in his future. The absolute favorite TV channel at the group home was Disney.  17 year olds watched Disney.  Why?  It is the station that shows family life.  We took Amy as a foster kid.   I watched Amy spend her entire life savings of $42, earned at her job at Sonic, on Mothers Day.  It took me 3 hours following her around Walmart as she debated with herself over every gift. I remember Marcus, whose West African ancestry didn’t exactly match my German/Dutch. He latched onto us, calling us Mom and Dad while riding his bike down the hill every day he could. For what?  So he could run around with me fixing screen doors the renters had kicked out.  I remember cleaning a trashed-out house with Hayna.  He found a soiled magazine picture of a dog.  Stared at it a long time and asked if he could keep it.  Because it reminded him of a dog he had when he was 3, before his dad died and his mom got on drugs.  Warning: These are not composite characters!

The government cannot hold your hand when you walk down the aisle on wedding day.  The state won’t teach you how to measure up and be a man.  It’s not that the state is bad, they are just a safety net.  They are Uncle Sucker when they get suckered by welfare cheats and Uncle Sucker when they suck the taxes out of free people.  And they are Uncle Sucker when they encumber themselves with so many rules they don’t even know the rules themselves. 

If Julia was real, I’d ask her, “You want a real Mom and Dad?  Friends, Family and a Future?  Or do you  want Uncle Sucker?”  I know what Julia would say.

Zeros and Soakers

Steve gave me a copy of Laffer, Moore and Willliams book, Rich States, Poor States.  Bombshell conclusions!  Laffer is the economist who first studied Sweden and concluded that there was a relative maximum at which the state can tax.  Tax more than that and revenues actually fall because people are hiding their incomes and avoiding taxes.  He then applied this to USA and found that during the Eisenhower Administration, taxes reached this max and that by cutting taxes, Kennedy actually achieved higher revenues.  This Supply Side Theory then became the hallmark of Reagan’s revival of Carterville, Thatcher’s revival of the British Disease and the Pacific Tigers’ (Japan to Australia) fabulous success .  Steve Moore is the well-known guest on FOX business channel and senior economist for Wall Street Journal.  Jonathan Williams worked for the non-partisan Tax Foundation for years and is now director for Center for State Fiscal Reform.

These guys researched the matter of ‘what makes a state prosper’ and considered many things.  For example, they looked at right-to-work states.  Turns out that right-to-work states are slightly more prosperous than Union shop states but not significantly.  This either overturns older research in the 70’s or maybe it is simply because only about 10% of people are still unionized today, down from 42% in the fifties. State indebtedness also somewhat correlates, but not strongly.  They began looking at taxation because tax incentives matter to people.  People don’t just work for the purpose of giving it all to the government.  They found there was no clear link between sales tax rates and economic performance.  Similar results were found for property taxes. But when they studied personal income and corporate taxes, the explosions of correlation began. 

Now just because you have correlation between two things, doesn’t mean you have cause.  Just because you have poor students in school that are malnourished, doesn’t mean that food makes brainpower or that all the skinny girls are dumb.  It may mean that the true cause of poor school performance is uncaring parents sending kids to school without breakfast and not caring if the kid gets an education either.  So when you deal with economics, which can’t do double-blind testing, you rely on duration and broad scope for proof.  If it has been going on for a long time in a variety of circumstances, then correlation is likely causal proof.

So here’s what they found.  9 states with no personal income taxes were compared with the 9 states with highest income taxes and highest overall taxes.  In every category of growth, the 9 Zeros outperformed the 9 Soakers—Gross State Product growth, employment growth, population growth and tax revenue growth.  Moreover virtually ALL the Zeros did better than the Soakers.  Two stunning statistics:  In employment growth, all nine Zero Taxers outdid the 9 high tax states. (Performance of each Zero was better than best performance of ANY high tax state.) If this upcoming election is going to be about jobs, put that in your pipe and smoke it! Tax revenue growth to the state was better in 8 of 9 Zero taxers than in the average of high-tax states.  Think of that.  If you are a liberal, progressive, love-big-government leftist, why wouldn’t you go for revenue growth for your state that comes with zero personal income tax policy?  You would only oppose it if you are more concerned with government control over people’s lives via high tax rates, than with actual government largess. 

The zero taxers come from all around the country—Alaska, Texas, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Nevada, Tennesee—and so do the high taxers—California, Oregon, Hawaii, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Maryland.   The only regional skew is that high tax states do not have any representatives from the deep South.  Hence some liberals have cried foul saying that climate, not low taxes, is the reason for all the growth of the Zeros.  That’s amusing.  So people are fleeing the paradise states of California and Hawaii and moving to Texas, Florida, and Arizona which have a summer fit only for mad dogs and Englishmen?  Or Alaska? Give me a break! 

And this growth result has been going on since at least 1971.  Among the Zero states, personal incomes have grown about 45% per decade vs. 25% in Soaker States.  11 states have initiated an income tax since 1961.  ALL eleven have shrunk as a percentage of the US economy since.  ALL eleven have shrunk in population as a % of US.

The relationship between corporate taxation and economic growth behaves in much the same way though less pronounced.  The 8 lowest vs. 8 highest corporate tax states has 52% vs. 43% GSP
 growth.  (Pers. Inc. Tax comparison of 9 Zeros vs. Soakers is 59% vs. 42% for example.) And the authors run possible groups excluding heavy mineral-rich states like WY and AK through all these calculations to see if reliance on severance taxes makes an effect.  It is not much.

The upshot is that personal income taxes is the most likely target to reform.  This might surprise some pro-business Republicans who would prefer to lower corporate tax rates.  It might surprise some Democrats who would like nothing better than to tax the rich more.  And it probably surprises the conventional wisdom that since taxes are miserable, states should spread the misery around by taxing everything possible.  Texas and Florida really do know what they are doing.  California, Hawaii and New York are great states with many advantages but taxwise they are fools.  We will have to watch what happens to Wisconsin and New Jersey under new management.  But most of all it tells Kansas and Oklahoma  to press forward with Zero Tax reforms.  To create a corridor of states from South Dakota to Texas where taxes are low would not just transform these states individually.  It would make a free enterprise zone where incoming businesses could choose their state of preference based on other factors while staying in the tax-free zone.  That is, the “French Quarter Effect”—people go to the French Quarter of New Orleans to dine, not because of a single restaurant, but because there is an entire zone of fine dining.

So then, could our state use a better economy, more jobs and greater revenue?  

Guts

Now you tell me, what is so gutsy about Obama giving the okay to go after Osama?  If I walked down the block and asked the first 10 guys, "If  you had been in that position and the military came to you one day and said, 'We've located him; can we go after him?' would you have approved it?"  At least 9 would say, "Sure!"  In fact it would be hard to find someone who would say, "I dunno.  I'd really have a hard time giving any kind of approval.  I really don't like to make decisions.  Maybe we could just all sit down and talk instead."  Well, no wait, there are a few liberals who would say that. But most people would say Go For It. 

Nor, as Bill Clinton alleged in that ad, would anything have come of it if the mission had failed.  We would never have heard of it.  Nobody would have admitted a thing. ( Tell me, what happened last week in CIA news. )But even if somehow a story would have come out, most Americans would have said, "Darn.  Missed. Time to reload."  There was no danger of losing thousands of men.  This is not in the same league as Caesar building a bridge across the Rhine and marching his men and then burning the bridge. Or Crockett and his Tenneseeans staying at the Alamo.  Or to pick a modern example, Ike writing two letters before D-day, one to celebrate triumph and one to take all blame for the loss of thousands of lives and tender his resignation.  Then calling the orders.  That's guts.

The only way you say Obama had guts was if you would postulate him in the midst of a bunch of cowardly anti-war leftists who would want his resignation the way they wanted LBJ's if something went wrong.  Umm, well, maybe that is the answer.  

Ponca Wonka Politics

Ponca Politics was today.  Our city has a forum for questions from citizens for our state senator and representative.  I swear that the questions are all from cranky retired teachers.  Typically half the questions will have to do with education.  That's a good topic, but there are rarely any questions about energy or petoleum. Isn't that the main industry of our city?  Isn't that the largest refinery in the midcontinent, outside the window?  Isn't there a drilling boom sweeping across the northern OK area?  Nor are there questions about agriculture.  One of the hottest issues this year is about the Obama administration's war on family farms and the oil and gas guys.  EPA wants to crucify the oil industry and doesn't want to let the farmer's wife and kids help the family business.  These issues are so intense because they threaten the economies of Kay and Osage counties.  No questions at Ponca Politics, however.  There are rarely any questions about roads and bridges although this was a major emphasis in the state because two years ago, 1600 of 6800 bridges were condemned or judged insufficient and dangerous.  And interestingly, one of our major employers is the largest contractor on roads of the state.  No tourism questions, no law enforcement questions, no military questions, no wildlife questions, no small business questions.  Two lakes, 5 museums, cross border meth lab problems, and a secretive anti-terrorist sensory facility in the town.  The town has had good economic growth despite the doldrums around the country are found here. Weird,hunh?

Good thing I'm not a politician having to answer these questions.  The School Super stood up (the guy who makes $205,000 a year and has an underling who makes 185) and decried "the disastrous cuts" that came in 2011.  Wait.  I seem to remember our Governor limiting cuts to 3% in education before further cuts would be made in other state functions.  And he made a rambling rant that was really rather like a speech than a question.  Finally he asked something about threshold levels of cuts and how distasteful they were.  I would have shot off at the guy.  What, with 53% of state budget going to elementary and secondary education, and colleges and Human services taking up another 35%, is the rest of the state supposed to live on?  53% of budget goes to 4% of the state's workers.  And we possess #30 in ACT test scores, civics, economics and business is hardly taught, and why are you griping about 3% cuts when I used to often have 30% cuts in my former small business?  And still some classes don't have textbooks.  Where does the money go?

Some of the questions were unanswerable--asking the guys to predict natural gas prices, for example.  Another old guy who I know to be a retired teacher stood up and scolded Fields and Vaughan over constant cuts in budget and taunting them with "When is the benefit from tax cuts coming."  That finally drew a Chris Christie remark from Vaughan and plea from Fields that no one can predict the timing of the economy.  I would have held up three fingers at the guy.  3 years.  That's how much time it took for the state to swell sales tax revenues to exceed the cuts in income taxes they did in 2005.  Those cuts doubled the state's growth from the prior decade and have been much talked about.  Sorry if that runs counter to your mindset.

So I don't know what to make of this forum sometimes.  Maybe that is why it has only 30-50 people in attendance.

Crucify or tax

I'm holding my breath waiting to hear from my Italian friends.  The news is full of some EPA administrator urging his folks to do to the oil industry like the Romans, go into a Turkish village and crucify the first 5 guys you run into.  Of course the commentators are making hay about how lawless that is and not according to ethics of government regulators at all.  Fair enough.
     I'm choking on the history.  Rarely did Romans do such things.  They were famous for Roman Law, which is the basis for our own law down to the present day.  It was particularly well-defined, attempted to be fair and was considered a step up to what the Romans called 'civilization'--and conquered peoples often grudgingly admitted they at least loved Roman Law. 
     What the Romans did was tax.  They taxed the bejabbers out of their conquered territory--about 25%.  In the case of many lands, residents simply changed the names of their gods to some Roman diety with a wink and a nod, kept paying their 25% temple tax and made it a problem for the priests.  Life went on as before.  Universal Greek and official Latin replaced native tongues.  Everyone aspired to Roman citizenship.  Roman rule was fairly popular everywhere except for one place, Palestine.  Jews had a system of paying civil authorities and also paying three tithes to the priesthood.  Two were annual 10% tithes and one was triannual. So the religious tax was 23.3%.  Atop this came the Roman tax of 25%.  Living on a subsistence, the Jews couldn't pay and during the reign of Herod the Great, he took their lands in lieu of their tax payments.  By the time of his death, he owned half the land of Palestine and landless Jews such as Joseph, father of Jesus, had to abandon his family home at Bethlehem and work as a builder ('tekton', Greek) where he could find work.  The Jews couldn't take it and rebelled. And beginning in 66 AD the Romans had had enough and started a genocide campaign against the Jews that ended with the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70.
     What Obama does is tax.  And Taxmaggedon is on the way January 2013 when he will have more "flexibility".  Tax is what will happen if we have a credit crisis.  Inflation is just another word for a hidden tax that robs people of the value of their life savings.  Tax is coming, unless we vote.  194 days.
    Oh, by the way, this EPA ding dong said the Romans went  into a Turkish village.  Turks were still in central Asia when Rome ruled.  Seljuk Turks didn't invade "Turkey" until 1000 years after Christ.  You think that EPA guy was educated in one of our government-run schools?

Hype and Chains

The apple does not fall far from the tree.  Barack Obama’s “Hype and Chains” looks like the Old Oklahoma Single Party System on steroids.  The Democrats controlled the OK legislature for almost a century and it looks a lot like Obamanation, just not so boldly socialist.  Consider these comparisons.

            Obama, who decried the deficit under the Republican Congress, began to spend like a—no, I won’t use the term ‘drunken sailor’ because he knows exactly what he is doing.  We will approach the 2012 election with $16 trillion of federal debt and nearing a debt crisis.  In OK the Democrat Governor spent like that too.  In 2011 the Republican legislature had to clean up a $600 million shortfall, 10% of the $6 billion budget.  Got ‘r done.  Obama hypes class warfare and constantly wants to raise taxes on the rich.  OK Dems did as well.  It still wasn’t enough.  We had 7.25% income taxes and still the rich didn’t pay their fair share. So the R’s lowered taxes to 5.25% and managed to make the economy grow at double the prior decade’s rate.  90 years of  single party rule blessed OK with so many loopholes, that the OK Tax Commission issued a report begging the legislature to simply void 90% of the tax dodges which could lower the income tax to about 3%.  This week the legislature votes on this proposal which ultimately could lead to no income tax whatsoever. So is “zero for everyone” fair?

            Obama hyped the chains of Obamacare and all our local leftists loved it.  The previous Gov accepted a $54million grant to immediately set up an Obamacare Exchange.  New Republican Governor Mary Fallin sent the money back since it would encumber the state to nearly double Medicaid recipients and start dictating health insurance policies.  Then our state joined in suing the Feds for 10^th Amendment violation. Likewise Obama won’t advance a proposal to fix Social Security or Medicare, and even cooks the books by double counting Medicare funding. Yeah, we have seen stuff like this. OK had a $16 billion unfunded teacher’s pension plan.  Evidently the previous guys either didn’t really care about the teachers or planned to soak the taxpayers when the bills came due.  New Republicans in the legislature are on the way to fixing that gap having shrunk $6 billion of the non-funding in the first year.  Fire fighters and police were also put on a permanent, reliable, maintained funding of pensions.

            Obama blames the lack of jobs on Bush even though the recession of 07 was over by June 09 and we have had an unprecedented jobless recovery for 3 years. One out of five people who want a job have none.  Bureau of Labor Statistics: 2009, 134.5 million employed;  2012, 131.6 million employed.  90% of college grads got jobs in the year Obama got elected and now it is 56%. We’ve seen it. In the 90’s Oklahoma had a recession despite the boom in the rest of America.  Kay County had 13% unemployment at one point, highest in the nation.  Oil bust, high taxes, poor farming, and everyone was leaving the state.  But beginning about 2005, the R’s promoted our natural gas resources, lowered taxes, led a spirited defense for agriculture and passed the Quality Jobs Act.  6.7% unemployment.  That ain’t no hype. 

            And then there are the chains of regulation.  Obama keeps trying to re-introduce gun control issues.  Fast and Furious was a blunder designed to hoodwink the voters into this.  In OK old gun control laws are crazy—the sort of thing you would see designed by people who want to skirt a distasteful issue, like eating your lutefisk.  You can defend yourself in a car with a gun.  You just can’t carry a gun in a car.  You can defend your property with a gun.  You just can’t carry a gun for that purpose.  “Hey, just shootin’ gophers when that guy attacked me.”  The R’s are getting this changed as well.  And just like Fast and Furious, Solyndra, et. al., and the GSA in Wonderland plus countless other federal idiocies, OK Dems owned the Education Dept. for 90 years and staffed it with highly paid educrats.  Hmm.  Audits now uncover a secret liquor-buying bank account.  Charges should soon be filed.

            Union buddies like SEIU have been noted having joint rallies with the American Communist Party.  The UAW got bailed out and indeed were made owners of two auto companies, against all known contract laws.   Here in OK the Dems are in bed with the teacher’s union and thus the state budget is 70% education.  That is, the entire rest of the state functions on just 30% of its budget.  (We have had 1600 bridges condemned out of 6800 total for over a decade.  The R fixed 900 of 'em last year alone.)  We have small town superintendents who make about as much as our US Senators at $250,000 a year.  Yet we rank roughly 30^th in ACT scores.  But that was before Janet Baressi, new Republican State Superintendent.  Now schools are given letter grades and an explanation of various areas needing improvement.  That has caused the educrats to scramble to make improvements. She got OK exempted from No Child Left Behind to the applause of both teachers and parents.

            Obama won’t drill.  He won’t even mine coal. Energy must be scarce and expensive. The EPA and Labor Dept. conduct a war on farmers trying to make family helpers illegal and treating spilled milk like an oil spill.  Regulation philosophy: "Crucify the first 5 people you see."  How’s that Hype and Chains working out for you? When OK filed an atmospheric haze abatement program with the feds they disregarded it.  Our Attorney General sued their kiester for violating their own haze regulations.

             Over and over we see the Obama /OK left at work.  War on Christianity, especially Catholics and Lutherans and evangelicals has been declared. Why who would listen to those bitter clingers?  But the OK conservatives passed a Personhood for the Unborn resolution last week with broad support, 73-14.  Oh, we must be racists who just wanted Trayvon “hunted down like an animal”.  Don’t tell that to incoming Republican  Speaker of the House,T.W. Shannon, who has African ancestry.  Pelosi’s Congress set student loan rates to double in July 2012 so they could demagogue it in an election year.  Oklahoma Republicans passed a measure to pilot a University Center in Ponca City.  Cheap. Rural access to over a dozen universities online but with tutorial help.  So you don’t need Obama’s loans.  No border fence with Mexico.  We just got voter ID here.  Occupy movement raising hell all over.  Hey, we got the Tea Party movement around here. Oh, did I mention that the head of the State Democrat Party accused the Grand Old Party of the Adults of the OKC bombing and venomously said that “Timothy McVeigh would be a Tea Partier if he were alive today.”

            Hype and chains.  Here, let me give you a Republican hacksaw to work on those chains.  

Communists

Was listening to Beck:

“So here’s Media Matters in their strategy when they actually applied for the IRS application, here’s what they said. They said that it is going to counter what it views as ‘pro Christian bias’ in the news reporting and analysis by the American media. It is common for news and commentary by the press to present viewpoints that tend to be overly and promoting a conservative Christian‑influenced ideology.”

            Perhaps such things make you yawn.  Let me tell you a very close story.  At age 19 I was a single parent, trying to work my way through school.  At that time nothing meant more to me than my faith and my daughter.  Ran across a Latvian-American student who had only a couple of finger nails on each hand.  I wondered why.  Here's what he said. “We are Christians. In Latvia, you dare not go to church since the priest is really a KGB agent.  So my parents were holding secret prayer and bible meetings in our home.  The KGB got wind of this and took my father in for interrogation and torture.  When he didn’t ‘break’, they brought me in.  I was 8.  And they began to pull the fingernails out of my fingers.  My father couldn’t take it and confessed all the names of people coming to the meetings.”  I was greatly and emotionally moved and said something idiotic about how cruel people could be, and he responded, “No, you don’t understand.  In order to join the International Communist Party you have to swear to the eradication of Christianity.  Otherwise they won’t accept you.” I guess the ICP aren’t live-and-let-live atheists, but vitriolically anti-Christian.

I'm still strong on faith and family.  Through the years I always told myself that R’s and D’s were just two viewpoints about how much government should there be.  And I didn't have time for politics.  But if any party began to enlist true, hardened communists, it was time for me to get active politically. With the ‘appointment’ of folks like Van Jones, Anita Dunn and half a dozen other communist party members among Obama’s czars, with his association with Ayers and Frank Davis, the time has arrived.  For these are not Alger Hiss style guys who manage to slip into the administration.  These are friends of Barack who make him what he is. 

But, you wince, isn’t Obama a Christian?  That’s rather debatable, considering that he only misquotes passages from the bible which support his leftist agenda.  And he makes statements like “America is not a Christian nation,”  Some have therefore called him a Muslim but that definition breaks down as well since Muslims are required to submit to the 5 Pillars of Islam and he hardly takes such things seriously.  I would classify him as a Nothing. But even if he were a Christian in some notional way, he is playing with fire by hiring the communists.

And by snagging the trip-wire of my faith’s eradication, I suddenly find myself dedicating a large part of my time to politics.  It is that simple. It's that serious. I guess I'm one of those "clingers" Obama talked about.  Not "bitter", just determined to bring back our country.