Mad City judge returns from vacation, inserts self again

Oh yeah, she had said she needed more time to consider whether the passage of the bill violated the open meetings act, then went on vacation. Now she’s baaaack, and still hasn’t ruled on the merits (such as they are NOT) The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

This Secretary of State business reminds me of the Illinois posturing about seating seedy Dem Sen. Roland Burris, using process to evade common sense. This is how the leftie-leaning legal profession strikes many of us these days. I thank God that after my acceptance at UW law school years ago, when I was still a wavering liberal, I got a private sector job offer and never looked back.

Another reason to eliminate Secretaries of State. (Isn’t that how corrupt IL GOP Gov. Ryan ascended?) And eliminate process, if it means you have to publish laws in the MSM for them to take effect. Why should they have so much power vested in them?

An interesting split among law profs at Marquette. One agrees with Judge SEIU Sumi. The other:

Richard Esenberg said he was not surprised by the ruling but criticized the judge.

“There is applicable Supreme Court precedent that a court has no authority to enjoin the publication of a law,” he said. “The state has repeatedly cited that law to her and as far as I know she has not only failed to explain herself about why she feels she has the authority, she hasn’t even acknowledged there is an issue. That just leaves me speechless.”

Esenberg was referring to a 1943 state Supreme Court opinion that said courts could not interfere with legislation until it is published and becomes law.

According to the JS the Assistant Attorney General says the law is absolutely still in effect.

As for the public sector unions and their ally Dem WI Secretary of State LaFollette, struck inarticulate by the TEA party, I will quote his famous relative, Fighting Bob:

“Free men of every generation must combat renewed efforts of organized force and greed to destroy liberty.”

More over by me at BackyardConservative.

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These two telling reads reveal the depth of our current problem. 

Iowahawk’s http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/feed-your-family-on-10-billion-a-day.html 

and Powerline’s http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/03/028631.php

The articles make it clear that far greater of a threat to our long term well being as a country than healthcare, childhood obesity and bullying in school, is the overwhelming debt we are amassing and continuing to pretend doesn’t really need fixing. 

Now is the time to act, when the CBO has just come out explaining that Whoops, we misunderestimated the deficits by 2.3 Trillion. 

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/CBO-Obama-understates-apf-1323525507.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=5&asset=&ccode=

Making that kind of error in math is rather  like claiming the weight posted on one’s driver’s license is legit.  Everyone KNOWS it’s bogus.  It’s just a question of degrees.  In this case, the White House is counting on everyone being exhausted by the numbers and the amount that has been so out of whack with reality as to make any attempts at less seem almost meaningless.

That lack of hope is what is in part has derailed the Non Tea Party elected members of congress from being as pumped up about cutting the deficit.  They will get credit for a negative victory if they hold fast.  It’s a lot harder to run on being fiscally prudent in election years when opponents will be able to carp on the legislators giving the state less, cutting programs and being obstructionists to government passing laws and providing services. 

Republicans are now allowing themselves to be sucked into the quagmire of spend, pay now and more later but  don’t read the fine print with their weak-kneed responses to the Democrats and promises that THERE WILL BE CUTS…but later. 

MEMO to Republicans: You asked for the opportunity to do the right thing….this is like life, you don’t get points for wanting to do the right thing if you do the wrong thing, and you don’t get points for doing the right thing later if you are doing the wrong thing now and you don’t get points for promising to do the right thing some day.   You do the right thing today and tomorrow and the next and the next and the next and the next.  Cut the federal spending.  Cut it across the board, in the discretionary and mandatory areas.  Roll it back to 2008 or even better, 2006.  Pin it back to the time the Democrats came into power.   You can do this, you just have to muster the steel.  My suggestion, adopt the language from Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” program. 

Learn the Fiscal Facts: What is Obesity?  In a person, it is excess body fat, and the normal range is 18.5 to 24.9, while a BMI of over 30 is considered Obese.  So Let’s take the GNP and declare that the Federal Deficit Index should be considered obese if it is over 30%.  

Now, does anyone see the government opting to make healthier choices for its  habits or taking time out to exercise rather than sit around all day eating our tax dollars?  No.  We see the Democrats howling about the draconian nature of not being able to supersize their fries.   We see the Republicans congratulating themselves on getting a diet coke with their Big Mac and Extra Large Fries.  We see the President talking to the kids about healthy eating choices while pulling into the drive thru and ordering all of them their happy meals of choice with a few pies for dessert.  They may make a cut but it will be dumb luck if it reduces any of our debt or deficit by a scintilla of an iota.  

Losing one pound when you need to shed 80 doesn’t feel very encouraging and with the current congress, we’re more talking about losing 1/1000th of a pound.   Rah. 

 I think I’ll wait to break out the skinny jeans.

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Walker Calls Out The One in the WaPo

Doesn’t this hugely amuse you too?

Our reform plan calls for a 5.8 percent pension contribution from government workers, including myself, and a 12.6 percent health insurance premium payment. Both are well below what middle-class, private-sector workers pay. Federal workers, however, pay an average of 28 percent of health insurance costs.

It’s enough to make you wonder why there are no protesters circling the White House.

Meanwhile, back in Obama’s home stomping grounds of Cook County, IL, there are actual calls for the public unions to back off.

Other states are exercising long latent citizen muscle to confront the public union excess driving us to the poorhouse.

Come on America, let’s move! Our way:)

 

Krugman Koolade

The Democratically controlled Congress has deemed as passed a 1.12 Trillion dollar budget with no budget attached for 2011 http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=37893 and Paul Krugman has explained that the only reason we’re not awash in good fortune is the idiots who have bought into the idea that trippling the debt in 18 months is somehow a bad thing are not investing.

No really.

He even calls it the Myth of Austerity.  And I thought all those struggling with jobs or finding their costs of living going up or feeling anxious about the future and taxes and our prosperity was based on facts like the looming tax hikes, the ever-increasing entitlements and debt and ever-increasing size of local, state and federal government.  It was all just in my silly woman’s head. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/02/opinion/02krugman.html?_r=1 

Apparently because we don’t believe Krugman’s theories or Keynesian economics, we’re all just stupid lemmings not to believe that priming the pump a’la  stimulus bills will bring about a recovery, (the fact that it hasn’t is a mere detail).  Given my apparent ignorance, I have to ask this simple question of true believers.  

At what point will the government have spent enough money to have us arrive at Utopia?  At what point will the primed pump gush forth its bounty the way oil is currently surging into the gulf?   At what point will you be able to tell us, “See.  See!  And You thought we were headed towards bankruptcy and massive inflation and ever spiraling worse debt!” 

What are the markers, the indicators of your success?  When will they show up?  Why will they show up?  At the moment, all I see is you scolding us for not believing because in our own simple hum drum lives if we spend three times what we make, we eventually have those bills come due and we wind up in huge trouble.  Do you live your lives this way, floating massive debt and having economic growth as a result?   Show me the money.

Show me the country, the past studies, the past history where this worked, on a micro scale, a macro scale, any scale other than the world of theory that this would all work if only…the government spent more…if only this had not happened…if only the states had done this…if only the businesses had believed in Tinkerbell just a little bit more.   Show me when Keynesian theory has worked and why.  Show me why you have such blind faith in these theories when the people whose business it is to make money and make money for other people, have no such trust in these scenarios: i.e. the investment class that you declare evil because they are unbelievers.  

This type of thinking by the existing congress, existing administration, existing elite economic theorists who write for the New York Times maintains, we just haven’t done enough.   So I ask, what is the number, the magic number at which you must declare that maybe, perhaps, this theory is just that, and not actual economic reality or do you have a number at which you would be willing to consider that possibly, real dollars and cents don’t work the way theoretical ones do.   

Spouting the only thing still tax free, my own two cents.

Keynes Environment and Economic Policy

I have a very liberal friend who when I expressed lament over the oil spill and non clean up going on in the Gulf chided me, “It’s not nearly as much as the volcano spewed in Iceland a few months ago. It also isn’t as toxic.”   

I sat there stunned.   I may be wrong but I don’t remember scores of pictures on the internet of ash covered birds and flora and fauna killed.  Maybe they were there but didn’t go viral.

Here I thought all pollution was so awful that we were to consider foregoing toilet paper, plastic bags, tinfoil, coke cans, cars, heat in the winter, disposable diapers, newspapers, paper plates, fast food and when possible breathing.  “Then why the hell am I recycling?” I demanded.  “It’s not like my not throwing away a paper plate is going to save the Earth!”   But I have to ask, if 100,000 gallons a day is nothing, then what is my decision to use paper plates?  I would assume, even more inconsequential.  She soothed, even my little dwarfed by the lot in the gulf mattered –something which I pointed out meant the lot in the gulf, even dwarfed by the Ocean mattered.    

Then I saw an article trying to explain in context how small the spill was in the context of the Gulf.   According to the piece by Seth Borenstein, http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5h3j4URYrsMh7yj4KTx6vVKjh4w3AD9GFQIS80 ,  the polluting in the Gulf was a mere trifle. 

It doesn’t even fill up the Superbowl in New Orleans.  It was more of the same kind of thinking and to my mind, a desperate spin to exhonerate the Federal government from the wrath of American people by minimizing the size of the spill and thus lowering expectations that the President or his administration should have or should be doing anything about something so insignificant.   Sure the pictures of dead dolphins and turtles are sad but hey, it’s really nothing. Go back to your lives citizens, nothing to worry about.

Paralleling this sort of thinking is the rash of recent articles about how We’re NOT SPENDING ENOUGH.  That Keynes would be upset that the current administration and congress are too cowardly to enact the type of necessary deficit spending required to lift the economy from it’s current state.  

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/2010/06/21/government_must_spend_now_save_later_236264.html

http://www.thenation.com/print/article/36491/goodbye-keynes-hello-hoover

In other words, the spending now is not enough to affect things really and to think otherwise is to be delusional.  These past spending bills that ran us up to 1.3 trillion are mere stop gap measures, like duct tape on a leak.  If we really want to make something happen, we’re going to have to start talking real money.  1.3 trillion dollars in deficit spending, like 126 million gallons in the gulf, is apparently a mere drop in the bucket to these people who subscribe to a Keynes Economic theory about how governments and civilizations maintain their finances.   

Maybe the spill is small and the deficit is nothing to those who live in the theoretical world where all of these high ideas work as long as one adopts every tenet of the theories and pays no attention to actual details which emerge.  But in the real world, how many dollars a person, a state, a government, spends, matter; just as surely as how much a person, a family, a city, a state, a business conserve and recycle matters.    

The money we’ve spent mattered because it must one day be paid.  The oil in the water kills crabs and shrimp and fish and plants and pelicans and people’s livelihoods and summer places and the businesses that thrive on people going to summer places and, and, and, and.  It must one day be removed.   

The 1.3 trillion in a single 18 months is an untenable pace of spending.  The 126 million gallons pouring into the gulf shows no signs of slowing or stopping either.   No amount of theory or perspective or spin will change the unalterable facts that while these dual disasters can be dwarfed by looking at a bigger picture of the whole world or galaxy or the whole history of time, they’re still very real and causing very real pain now, and for the foreseeable future.   Does anyone other than those who embrace the theoretical world of policy over the actual world of procedure not see that both are clear and persent dangers? 

How do we make the ivory tower people in power and in charge see what their pet theories will not prove?

Can you afford that house payment?

One of the reasons for the housing bubble bursting was people buying homes they couldn’t afford.  I don’t want to rehash all the reasons for this mess, but instead give you a different way of figuring out how much house you can afford to buy, and some insights on protecting yourself in these turbulent times.

Banks usually base payments on 28 to 33% of net income.  If the household take home income is 50K per year, at 28% that translates into a payment of $1,166.66 per month including principle, interest, taxes and insurance.   Using 33%, we come up with a payment of $1375.00.

Let’s explore an entirely different way to calculate your payment.  My method bases your house payment on the minimum wage of the state in which you reside.  I’m going to use $7.25 per hour because that seems to be the minimum wage figure in the majority of states.  I’m also going to include two wage earners in the household because that seems to be the norm.

Two people working full time at a minimum wage job will make approximately $2400.00 per month in gross salary.  Let’s be generous and say taxes and deductions come to $100.00 per person.  That means the net income to the household  is $2200.00.  When you figure 28% of that figure you come up with $616.00 for a house payment.  My husband and I are in our third house.  We have never had a house payment over $700.00 (PITI).  And, after finally sticking to Dave Ramsey’s way of managing money, we haven’t had car payments for over 20 years.

We live in unsettled times.  We have a maniac in the White House who is spending money that hasn’t even been printed yet.  Jobs are disappearing and new ones are not forthcoming.  There are people losing their jobs who believed it “could never happen to them.”  If worse came to worse and the two wage earners of the house were reduced to working minimum wage jobs, they would be able to keep a roof over their heads without too much trouble by using my “minimum wage” calculations.

To survive these turbulent times, one needs to become more self-sufficient and not be  not drowning in debt.

The concept of Courageous Restraint has merit.  We should give out medals to Congress if it opts not to spend or even just proposes the idea. That alone would be courage indeed.  The Economic theory these days that governs policy creation and government spending operates through the “Think system.”  http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/05/galbraith_the_danger_posed_by.html

I read it.  I read it again.  I read it a third time and the closest I could come to understanding was this is where the economic realities of my life and those of the theories that win Pulitzers are 180 degrees polar opposite.  I can’t see how it works ergo, I must be an idiot.

Galbraith represents this sort of thinking.  One particular strain of Keyesian economics as it were, rules the day. 

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/KeynesianEconomics.html 

Aparently debt plays a neutral part in monetary policy or aggregate demand for public/private money.  The theory goes like this: “inflation, unemployment, real GNP, and real national saving should not be affected by whether the government finances its spending with high taxes and low deficits or with low taxes and high deficits. Because people are rational, he argues, they will correctly perceive that low taxes and high deficits today must mean higher future taxes for them and their heirs. They will cut consumption and increase their saving by one dollar for each dollar increase in future tax liabilities.” 

Starting with the first principle, People are rational, please tell me another bedtime story.  Also, there’s the idea that one must and that cutting consumption so as to pay for more taxes is a good thing as versus spending it on anything else other than the state.

“Because the government needs to run a deficit, it’s the only way to inject financial resources into the economy. If you’re not running a deficit, it’s draining the pockets of the private sector.” 

If money is a zero sum game, then the money is either draining the private or public sector; ergo either the government or the governed shall have money to invest. 

If money is not a zero sum or fixed amount, how is it that not running a deficit by the federal government drains the pockets of the private sector?  To my way  of thinking, i.e. logic,  if you run a deficit, to pay the government so it can service it’s debt while providing the services you demand it provide, you must tax more, draining the pockets of the private sector to maintain or sustain a deficit. 

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64B53W20100512

Further, if the government runs a deficit in perpetuity that only grows, the money to pay those bills comes from somewhere and that is the tax payers –through fees, through state taxes to make up the difference in unfunded mandates, through federal taxes, through the “closing of loopholes” through value added taxes, sin taxes and tolls, interest on federal loans, limitations on profit, additional audits, and limitations on services.  Taxes will “drain the pockets of the private sector” to pay for the public sector.  It’s the only way the public sector exists, if the private sector pays.  

The creature that is Government unchecked, unrestrained, unmeasured and unending will devour everything it can. The hypothetical typical American family will be able to sustain itself at its current state only as long as nothing happens to increase debt or limit income.  Taxes do both at the same time.   If the government will not give up one red cent, then the tax payer must give up the red cents for it.

But I’m a mere Haus Frau so obviously I can’t understand.

Finally, and this is my 2 untaxed cents worth of thought here, how could the effect of the deficit being zero be true in perpetuity?  If people are rational as the orriginal premise of this arguement declares, wouldn’t they think spending one’s self in to further and further debt will eventually yeild diminishing returns by the state and for the self?  

If we spend more than our nation can bear in taxes, no matter how many times you shuffle the deck or redistribute the wealth, there will be people hurt by the government’s need for more money, who are on the line where the government deems too much, not enough and the only solutions are for those people unlucky enough to be targed will be to cut services and things they want or perhaps need, thereby increasing unemployment or lowering demand for goods and services, hurting other businesses. 

The consequence will be  an economic spiral of more demand for government services by those hurt by the cutbacks in business to make up the difference and less revenue, resulting in less generated tax revenue that had been heretofore budgeted to pay for those services.

Greater demand will spur further raise taxes to meet existing debt demands and services, ultimately meaning, still more people will have to surrender their little comforts for the good of the state. And our state will become less good. 

We will become a thin nation by default or because of default; our wallets will weigh considerably less anyway; that people are only angry and showing up at tea parties to voice concerns about the spiraling deficit and the wretched relenteless and seemingly perpetual excesses of Congress despite being labeled racists, homophobes, bigots, rednecks, ignorant yokels and the like, that might be the true definition of Courageous restraint.   After all, according to the smartest theorists running the country, we’re rational.

Wonder if we could get medals for our trouble. 

Precision: Federal Debt 90% of GDP

A precise CBO report you won’t hear Nancy Pelosi raving about:

President Obama’s fiscal 2011 budget will generate nearly $10 trillion in cumulative budget deficits over the next 10 years, $1.2 trillion more than the administration projected, and raise the federal debt to 90 percent of the nation’s economic output by 2020, the Congressional Budget Office reported Thursday.

In its 2011 budget, which the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released Feb. 1, the administration projected a 10-year deficit total of $8.53 trillion. After looking it over, CBO said in its final analysis, released Thursday, that the president’s budget would generate a combined $9.75 trillion in deficits over the next decade.

Unsustainable both, a Democratic majority and their spending. Related: The Tax Man Cometh

Blue States Spill the Most Red Ink

Neil Weinberg, Forbes. This is not a surprise to anyone who lives in a blue state. You can add to that the urban areas that dominate them are run by Dems as well. A familiar litany of excess:

Forbes’ metrics for each state included unfunded pension liabilities, changes in tax revenue, credit ratings, debt as a percentage of Gross State Product, debt per capita, growth expectations for employment and the state economy, net migrations and a “moocher ratio” that compares government employees, pension burdens and Medicaid enrollees to private-sector employment.

One of the abuses is the nexus between union construction and Democrat politicians–you might say they donate to each other with our money. This is one notorious example in Illinois–building tollway sound barrier walls brick by brick. A real work of art.

Too bad we can’t auction them off. But maybe this time we can finally vote a lot of them out.

P.S. And as we know to our cost, this is precisely the approach our President Barack Obama, blue state Dem product, took with the stimulus program–the public sector union boondoggle that hogged close to half the money, and is starving the private sector.

British Tea Party Launches!

Can we call it reverse colonialism? We’re remembering in Chicago a year later–thank you Rick Santelli. Now our neighbors across the pond are joining us in the spirit.

More here.

“You know, casting the other side as somehow nefarious and evil and poorly intended is the oldest trick in the book.”

Paul Ryan’s answer to a question posed in a condensed interview in the New York Times was a thing of beauty.   Consider the actual question posed by the Times author Deborah Solomon:

He seems genuinely pained by what he has called the “obstinacy” of Congressional Republicans and their just-say-no obstructionism.

There’s more:

Your “Road Map,” we should explain, is a somewhat alarming document that proposes, in 600-plus pages, erasing the federal deficit by radically restricting the government’s role in social programs like Social Security and Medicare. The president described it as “a serious proposal.”

Right. And then the next day his budget director starts ripping me and then the day after that the entire Democratic National Committee political machine starts launching demagogic attacks on me and my plan. So when you hear the word “bipartisanship” come from the president and then you see his political machine get in full-force attack mode, it comes across as very insincere.

Ironically, Ms. Solomon begins the interview by noting the President has declared Ryan a “pretty sincere guy.” Ryan’s answers throughout give no such impression of the President, however.    Then again, we know Ryan is quite sincere, why should he say something he has been given no cause to believe is true?