photo credit: (Yuri Yuriev/AFP/Getty Images)
The new year, 2015, will be here in a couple of days. The ball will drop in Times Square, and almost simultaneously hats will drop into the 2016 presidential election ring as campaigning starts in earnest. The GOP is on a roll, having won both houses, and fully expects to win the White House by default as President Obama’s approval rating tracks right along with the wind chill in Fairbanks.
I admit I have never understood how the Republican party filters down to its final presidential candidate. Obviously, whoever would make the best president should be the party’s candidate of choice. But there doesn’t seem to be any established criteria for what makes a good conservative president. I’m pretty sure the Republican leadership would say their candidate should be whoever is the most “electable”.
Here’s my simple conservative list of required qualifications for the “leader of the pack”:
Honesty. What distinguishes conservatives from liberals? Essentially, it is respect for the truth. The word “right” means correct. It also means just. Maybe it’s no coincidence that it also means conservative. We Rock on the Right Side because we know that there is right and wrong, and the truth is always right. Many liberal Democrats openly lie. They aren’t even embarrassed about it (when will Al Sharpton publicly apologize for the Tawana Brawley lie?). The liberal playbooks (Saul Alinsky, Cloward and Piven) say “the end justifies the means”, and if you have to lie to the people to get what you want (political power, personal profit, etc.), so be it. Communist countries embrace dishonesty – lying has been raised to an art form in North Korea – and our current administration seems to operate in “Kim Jong Un” mode. “You can keep your insurance,” “the Benghazi attack was because of a video,” “all of our hard drives crashed simultaneously”.
In the age of YouTube, our opponents can be beat to death with their own lies.The best way to differentiate ourselves from our liberal political opponents is to be honest. That means our conservative presidential candidate had better have a squeaky clean personal and professional history, and be a straight shooter. A person who will lie to his or her spouse will certainly have no problem lying to anyone else. We want a leader we can trust.Economic Savvy. Our current president has never held a private sector job – never flipped a burger, fixed a tire, or washed a window. He has never produced wealth for himself or an employer. While he has been extensively involved in the redistribution of other people’s money, he has never built anything on his own. Even his short legal career in racial discrimination cases was funded by the government. To compound the problem, once in office, Obama surrounded himself with academic elites – almost nobody in this administration has ever held a private sector job. The results were predictable – while the stock market, well-connected corporate cronies, and bureaucrats enjoy record gains, family incomes lag far below pre-Obama levels and the few new jobs that were created went to immigrants.
The US president is the head of the largest economy in the world – it is unthinkable that anyone in that position should not have extensive experience, knowledge, and proven skill in free market economics. Nothing is more important to every US citizen than economic security and opportunity for our families. We want a financial guru at the helm.Leadership. Our president is referred to as the “leader of the free world.” This person must have extraordinary qualities that inspire us to follow – qualities like the ability to make difficult decisions firmly and fairly, the vision and discernment to see alternative solutions that may escape others, and the humanity to care about those in his charge. A leader is brave. A leader takes responsibility and doesn’t make excuses. A leader is optimistic and forward-thinking. A leader is dedicated and hard-working. We want a president who knows what leadership is.
We have all known people who have these qualities. They are out there. Somewhere between the Atlantic and the Pacific is the person who could get this big ship turned around and headed the “right” way again. It won’t be easy, with the state of big-money corruption in DC and the embarrassing ineptness of our current party leadership. But it can be done.
I’ll give you another couple of days off. And then let’s get to work.
Tom Balek – Rockin’ On the Right Side
My folks were always putting him down
They said, he came from the wrong side of town
They told me, he was bad, but I knew he was sad
That’s why I fell for the leader of the pack
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Shutdown!
“ShutDown? ShutDown! Oh, no, that would be too risky. Remember when we got blamed for shutting down the government? Whenever there is a shutdown, we ALWAYS get the blame!”
So the Republican leadership strong-armed their members into passing the CRomnibus (Continuing Resolution / Omnibus) spending bill, giving Obama and Reid everything they wanted in the way of flatulent government spending all the way to September of 2015, the end of the fiscal year. Never mind that the Republicans won big in the November elections and now hold majorities in both houses. Now they can take it easy in DC until next football season, when the Redskins will no longer have RG3 to kick around.
“We just couldn’t take the risk,” they said. Somebody might think we Republicans are MEANIES if we don’t commit to spend another $1.1 TRILLION for such critical programs as a new National Women’s Museum, continuing the corporate crony Import/Export Bank, and other little items like ObamaCare and benefits for illegal immigrants.
John Hayward, in Human Events, succinctly pointed out the lunacy of it all, saying:
There was no reason to give the defeated Democrats anything except a stop-gap bill to fund the government through January, at which point the incoming Republican majorities should have exercised control over everything. If the Democrats don’t like that deal, let them shut down the government in a fit of pique, and tell voters how the party they just threw out of power should be allowed to control their lives for an extra year. Not only would that be smart politics – giving the Republicans more fiscal leverage to stand up for America against Obama’s amnesty, instead of just funding for the Department of Homeland Security – but it would represent more sensible and responsible government. All of this multi-trillion-dollar monstrosity is linked together; all of it should be on the table; the flab should be liposuctioned out of every agency at once in a comprehensive plan for fiscal sanity and increased American liberty.
Why did the Republican leadership do it? Why did they fritter away a golden opportunity to actually shrink government, as the entire GOP promised in their campaign speeches? And, simultaneously, giving support to the knuckle-head programs they were elected to stop?
“Shutdown! OMG, we’ll be accused of SHUUUUUT-DOOOOOOOWN!”
According to Ron Paul, “Most House and Senate members are so terrified of another government shutdown that they would rather vote for a 1,774-page bill they have not read than risk even a one or two-day government shutdown.” Paul says instead of briefly shutting down 20% of the government offices, better we should permanently close major parts of the federal government – starting with the Federal Reserve, and followed closely by the Internal Revenue Service.
The Democrats aren’t afraid of shutting down the government as a tactic. Rush Limbaugh pointed out that they voted to do just that when all 212 Democrat representatives in the House voted against the rule that set the stage for passage of the CRomnibus spending bill. “In other words, 212 Democrats voted against the rule, voted against bringing up the final vote on the omnibus bill. Now, you could say, as I just did, that the Democrats essentially voted to shut down the government, but nowhere would this ever be portrayed as what actually happened,” Rush reported. They weren’t the least bit worried about being blamed for the big SD.
But Boehner and friends shrink in terror at the very thought.
Frankly, I don’t get it. I have lived through a number of government shutdowns, without any negative lingering effects. I know, last time the big SD happened we paid some people double-time-and-a-half to put roadblocks on the highway so tourists could not see Mount Rushmore as they drove through the Black Hills. And we spent extra money on barriers to keep World War II vets from seeing their monument. But everybody got their government checks on time, soldiers and sailors still reported for duty, and as far as I know even the government employees who didn’t go to work got full back pay (bonus!) as soon as the SHUTDOWN crisis was over.
Not all Republicans are weak-kneed milktoasts. 67 GOP congressmen, including my rep Mick Mulvaney (R-SC), voted against the CRomnibus. More Democrats voted against it than for it, but for different reasons. Sadly, the majority of Republican members acquiesced to their leadership. You can see how your congressman voted on this and other key issues at the Heritage Action Scorecard.
Personally, I am all for government shut down. If that’s what it takes to get the budget under control, I say shut ‘er down. And while we are at it, let’s take a good hard look at replacing the Republican leadership.
Tom Balek – Rockin’ On the Right Side
Shut it off, shut it off
Buddy, now I shut you down!
Reacting to Crises vs. Thinking About Tomorrow
Every now and then I complain that the news media/liberal government is totally geared to our tiny little attention spans (the news media and liberal government are now inseparable and indistinguishable). They fully understand and exploit how soon we forget one earth-shaking news story when the next one comes along. We don’t care whether the last crisis was explained, let alone resolved. Instead we lurch ahead to the latest shocking crisis. And the news media/liberal government seemingly never runs out of crises. We’re so busy dealing with the latest crisis that we never take the time to look ahead.
Do you feel manipulated?
A few weeks ago the earth stopped rotating because Central American kids were walking across our southern border expecting (and receiving) amnesty. It was 24/7 news. What happened? The hand-wringing, the speeches, the headlines, the passion, the crisis – it all just . . . stopped.
Benghazi? Forgotten. Kidnapped Nigerian girls? Who cares. Even the Ferguson riots don’t matter today.
The VA scandal? Hmmph. The IRS targeting of conservative groups? No big. Trayvon Martin? Operation Fast and Furious? Free birth control pills for Sandra Fluke? Syria? Ukraine? Hamas lobbing rockets into Israel? Fagettaboutit.
I thought ObamaCare was a BFD. Joe Biden said so. But I haven’t heard anything about it in the news for a long time. Have you? Everything must be just peachy.
Today it’s all about ISIS. Or ISIL. (Why can’t the news media/liberal government just pick one label?) The shocking beheadings supercede any and all previous shocks. Until the next shock.
Rahm Emanuel said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Hillary Clinton doubled down on the same strategy. They are disciples, along with Barack Obama, of Saul Alinsky and the Cloward-Piven Strategy, which advises socialists to stir up as much crisis as possible in order to drive the frightened and under-informed into the warm and waiting arms of a big-government oligarchy. Cloward and Piven were deep-thinking socialists from Columbia University – Barack Obama’s alma mater. But I digress.
Wouldn’t it be great if our political leaders would, just once, look ahead a little instead of just reacting to the latest crisis?
They could be figuring out how to match up the capabilities of the work force with the needs of employers. Or maybe what role our tremendous energy resources could play in the world economy. We could be working on a mathematical solution to our insolvent social security system (it is do-able). Shoot, maybe somebody could be thinking about how to deal with the cancerous radical Muslim ideology that threatens to overwhelm the politically-correct Western world. Our president says, “we don’t have a strategy yet.”
We need political leaders who are thinking about tomorrow to replace those who only react to the latest crisis.
Tom Balek – Rockin’ On the Right Side
Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow
Don’t stop, it’ll soon be here
It’ll be better than before
Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone
Yup, the gig with the USC marching band – Classic!
No One Ever Is To Blame
It must be great to work for the federal government.
The pay is outstanding – the CBO says wages and benefits for almost all federal workers are much higher than for the same jobs in the private sector. Federal employees get extra paid days off, like extra holidays, personal leave time, snow days, sick days, etc. They get full pay for not working whenever the President chooses to shut the government down rather than live within a budget. They can take early retirement from their federal jobs after 20 years if they are 50 years old.
Heck, while private sector managers work 45 – 55 hours per week, the upper-half of the federal food chain works only about half-time. I have offered a standing challenge for many years (and done the exercise myself many times): pick any manager-level federal employee, at random, from the government phone directory and call his or her office after 2:00 pm on Monday through Thursday, or after 12:00 pm on any Friday. You will never, never, never reach that person. Never. Try it!
But the best thing of all about working for the federal government is: nobody ever gets fired. Once you land a federal job, you will get your full paycheck, pay raises, ever-growing benefits, and bonuses for the rest of your life, no matter how poorly you perform. Turnover is virtually non-existent. Even the guy who was written up for farting at employees 61 times in 17 days was not reprimanded.
Jeff Neely, the GSA executive who helped put together the million-dollar conference in Las Vegas for his 300 hard-working office jockeys, is a rare exception – he actually got fired. But he was reinstated eleven months later with full back pay.
My Congressman, Mick Mulvaney (R-SC), at one of his outstanding recent town hall meetings, told us, “The Veteran’s Administration has 330,000 employees and only about 500 have been fired in the last ten years.” Meanwhile executives in the VA received bonuses based on fictitious reports about their pristine performance while soldiers died waiting for health care. Director Eric Shinseki was powerless to fire anybody, and committed political hara-kiri by resigning.
Congressman Mulvaney told another stunning story about a meeting he had with an upper-level HUD executive. He was grilling her about some problem in her agency, and she was having none of it. “Don’t give me a hard time,” she said. “I don’t make that much money and it doesn’t matter whether I do a good job or not.” She had absolutely no fear of discipline from a United States Congressman. Is that job security, or what?
And it’s not just the mid-level federal employees who are totally unaccountable. When pressed for evidence that she knew would implicate her in a world-class corruption scandal, IRS director Lois Lerner made up a story about seven simultaneous hard-drive failures that ate her e-mails. The odds of that happening are one in 79 billion. Nobody has been held accountable.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is made of Teflon, too. She never has recanted the lame excuse that terrorists murdered our Libyan ambassador and his brave defenders because they were upset about a Hollywood video. One of the terrorists admitted planning and executing the Benghazi attack, but knew nothing about any video, and the CIA was listening in on terrorist phone activity during the attack, which never mentioned any video. She still deflects questions about her failure to provide adequate protection after it was requested, saying “what does it matter?” And nobody has even asked yet why the ambassador was in Benghazi in the first place. Not only is she not accountable for the fiasco, Clinton is the current leader in the 2016 presidential race.
President Obama carries a long list of excuses for the many failures of his administration. Most of them blame his predecessor. The latest failure is the border crisis that resulted from his open invitation to illegal immigrant children to enter our country and enjoy the amenities. When he finally did go to Texas to meet with Governor Perry, who is trying to deal with the situation, he spent most of his time shifting the blame.
I seldom agree with John Boehner any more, but I jumped up and cheered when, in utter exasperation with the Obama administration, he cried, “He’s been president for five and a half years. When is he going to take responsibility for SOMETHING!”
But hey, it’s the government. No one ever is to blame.
Tom Balek – Rockin’ On the Right Side
Doctor says you’re cured but you still feel the pain
Aspirations in the clouds but your hopes go down the drain
No one ever is to blame.
Howard Jones – No One Is to Blame
I want to thank all the many great songwriters and performers who inspire and enrich my blog topics. This is one of the best “fits” – music to message – yet, I think! Here’s a great live performance by Howard Jones, very much enjoyed by his audience.
Wake Up, Republicans!
Republican incumbents are geared up for battle – but not all of them against their traditional Democrat opponents. This year many are at war with the conservatives of their own party.
It has been clear for some time that the GOP views the Tea Party as a threat. After all, the Tea Party stands for the American Dream – personal freedom, economic freedom, and a debt free future for our kids and grandkids. The entrenched Republican incumbents certainly wouldn’t want to be associated with extremists who think like that, would they?
At the national level, House Speaker John Boehner has blasted rogue members who try to hold the line on spending, apparently believing that the Republicans must distribute that cash as rapidly and freely as their Democrat counterparts, or risk losing what little power they still have. A more cynical view, which I presented recently, has the Speaker and friends protecting their lucrative DC posts for personal financial gain, at the expense of the citizens who elected them.
Today, House conservatives were furious as the Republican leadership slid an important spending bill through on a voice vote while most members were not even present. Rep. Paul Broun (R-Georgia) said, “I consider it a step backwards for democracy,” in a blunt statement to The Daily Caller. “This Putin-esque behavior is an example of why I voted against Boehner as Speaker of the House.”
Similar combat is being waged at the state houses. The battle for control of the GOP in Montana is white-hot. Last year a group of liberal Republican state senators enraged their conservative constituents by voting to the left of most Democrats in the GOP-dominated Montana legislature. If that wasn’t insult enough, now this comedy troupe, calling themselves the “Responsible Republicans,” are coercing local central committees to postpone their traditional GOP fundraising and candidate dinners until after the primary elections to prevent voters from learning about their conservative primary rivals. The state Republican party just winks.
One of the challengers, conservative candidate for state legislature Jim Anderson of Choteau, MT, said, “How can anyone who claims to support a vibrant Republican Party ignore the constitutional and party process for choosing the best candidates? Is it an unwritten rule that no one can oppose an incumbent?”
In recent elections the Democrats were handed the opportunity of their dreams. Here you go, guys, it’s all yours! Your time to shine! They promptly shot themselves in the foot, both hands, and the derriere. They gave us ObamaCare, Common Core, rampant corruption, disregard of the Constitution and laws, degradation of state’s rights, abysmal foreign policy, disassembly of the military, a catatonic economy – and those are their HIGHLIGHTS. Republicans should be dancing a jig. Instead, they curl up in a ball, afraid to seize the moment and do something big and right for a change.
Wake up, GOP. You may not get a chance like this again.
Tom Balek – Rockin’ On the Right Side
The movie wasn’t so hot
It didn’t have much of a plot
We fell asleep, our goose is cooked
Our reputation is shot
Wake up, little Susie!
Wake up, little Susie!
Yeah, Joe, It’s A Big F***ing Deal!
March 23, 2010: Vice President Joe Biden introduced Barack Obama to the adoring gathered media, grabbed a handshake, lit up his biggest goofy grin, and told the President, “This is a big fucking deal!”
Yeah, Joe, it was. It still is.
Four years later, citizens still scramble to make sense of it all – to try to save some scraps of access to quality health care in the age of ObamaCare – over 11,000 pages of intentionally obtuse regulations – a stack of paper over three feet high, and growing – a set of laws that no longer resembles the one passed by Congress – shuffled almost weekly by politically-motivated Obama imprimaturs – a Reid/Pelosi head fake toward the ultimate goal of national health care.
There are few winners, many losers, and a rush-hour freeway full of people who are just totally baffled. As the (extended) enrollment deadline of March 31 approaches, American families are coming down to crunch time. How the hell are we going to have health insurance that we can afford, and that actually works? And what will be the cost to a nation already punch-drunk from the economic fun-house imposed on us by a Peter Principle community organizer with no clue?
Like all Americans, my wife and I are on the front lines in the ObamaCare battle. I don’t want to bore you with details – each of us has his own sad ObamaCare ballad to sing. In short: our policy was cancelled because it was not ObamaCare compliant. ‘His Eminence’ declared we could “keep our insurance” – then we could not – then we could. When we finally could, the premium was nearly double. But as responsible conservative Americans do, we bit the bullet and paid the freight. Then, a few months later, we moved to another state and found we had no choice but to buy into ObamaCare.
The Health Care dot gov website, although somewhat functional, was replete with errors and inconsistencies. The deductible is $500. No wait, this page says $5000! That page says our doctors are in the network and will be paid by insurance. But wait! This page says they are not in the network and there will be no reimbursement! Phone calls to the insurance provider go directly to voice-mail hell. The one “advisor” who eventually called me back was at the end of her rope – apologetically as baffled as the rest of us.
Having lost our grandfathered policy, we had no choice but to enroll for coverage on the “exchange” and accept whatever the government decided to give us – aka the ‘Soviet’ position. Yes, the taxpayer-funded subsidy makes our premium attractive. But we don’t know if we can keep our doctors and top-notch local hospital. We are pretty sure we won’t have access to the premier cancer and heart clinics that are the best hope of those most in need of God’s medical mercy. There are 11,000 pages of fine print that are way beyond our control. It feels like we have been sold a ten-dollar buffet lunch where a dollar’s worth is about all you can stomach. Worst of all, we – for the first time in our lives – are ashamed to be forced into leaning on the hard-working taxpayers of our once-proud country. Except for my Obama Phone – but that was just to make a point.
Yeah, Joe. ObamaCare is a big fucking deal. You guys screwed the country out of the best health care system in the world. It’s a big, sad, fucking deal.
Tom Balek – Rockin’ On the Right Side
A spelling test compliments of Country Joe McDonald
at Woodstock, 1969. Plenty of “F-Bombs” as reprised by VP Joe Biden –
Big-Government Fails – What Did You Expect?
Is anybody surprised?
We now know, irrefutably, that ObamaCare really IS a train wreck. The Affordable Care Act has instantly made health care unaffordable for millions of previously happily-insured Americans. Many have lost coverage altogether – experts now predict that another 50 to 100 million cancellations are on the way. It has ballooned the Medicaid rolls to the point where states don’t know how they will be able to manage the cost. Using CBO data, the total cost of ObamaCare has been calculated at up to $3 Trillion over ten years. And after three and a half years and $1 billion of IT work, the still-dysfunctional ObamaCare website is 40% short of completion (including the part which is supposed to deliver our subsidy payments to the insurance companies) and the personal data collected by it is not secure.
Well, what did you expect? You glassy-eyed Obama zombies, you liberal/progressive elitists, you arrogant academics, you shameless, thrill-up-the-leg media hucksters, you blind-ambition Democrat politicians, you weak-kneed RINOs who value re-election over the will and well-being of your constituents, you crocodile-tear bleeding hearts who never contribute your own money to anything – what do you say now? Did you really believe the bungling bloated bureaucracy you created and enabled, and Obama’s corrupt campaign-contributing cronies could actually pull off an undertaking of this scope?
Really? The same big-government people who gave away $4 billion dollars in tax refunds to identity thieves, including 655 refunds to one address in Lithuania? The same big-government people who left an ambassador and three brave defenders to die at the hands of radical Muslim thugs and then blamed it on a Hollywood video? The same big-government people who waste billions of dollars humiliating grandmothers in airports, but fail to follow up on Russian warnings about known terrorists?
There was a time when the U.S. government could get things done. World War II comes to mind. The Hoover Dam. The Interstate Highway System. Astronauts on the moon. Those days are gone. We have allowed our government to become corrupt, fat, lazy, and mired in irrelevant politically correct nonsense. Rudderless. Incompetent. Pathetic.
While they did little to address the impending health care problem for decades, I give credit to the 100% of DC Republicans (and a smattering of responsible Democrats) who at least voted against ObamaCare. Ted Cruz and a few brave conservatives went to the wall to try to stop it. The Tea Party took the point on patrol, battling every assault on personal freedoms, free-market capitalism, and the values that built our nation’s success. But they couldn’t stop this latest, potentially fatal attack on Lady Liberty.
If the liberal progressives do not finally admit and capitulate to the total failure of big-government socialism now, in the face of irrefutable evidence, their motives are clear.
Tom Balek – Rockin’ On the Right Side
You’ve been talking in circles
Since I’ve been able to cry
There’s never been any reason
for ever telling me why
Save my life, I’m going down for the last time!
Never Been Any Reason – Head East
Dana Loesch – Attitude!
Girl got ATTITUDE!
Nuff said.
Tom Balek – Rockin’ On the Right Side
I’m in control, my worries are few
‘Cause I’ve got love like I never knew
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh
I got a new attitude
New Attitude - Patti LaBelle
Do You Know What Common Core Is Yet?
I posed this question almost a year ago, and today I ask again – do you know what Common Core is?
Common Core, the biggest change in education in US history, is underway, and yet it continues to fly mostly under the radar. If your child or grandchild is in a public school, it is almost certain that he or she is already caught up in this total overhaul of our public education system. Even if you don’t have children involved, you should be concerned because most citizens feel that education is the linch-pin to the success of our nation and way of life.
“Wait a minute,” you might ask. “If Common Core is such a big deal, why haven’t I heard anything about it?” And that is a very important question. Did your school ask you whether you wanted to implement Common Core? Were you involved in deciding what is important in your child’s education? Whenever a major government program is kept secret – especially one that will have such a major impact on your children – you should wonder why.
Here are the basic tenets of Common Core:
- national standards will be applied to make education homogeneous across the country
- teaching methods and content will be focused on preparation for college and careers, rather than the attainment of general knowledge and skills
- courses will encompass more “rigor” (higher level learning)
- content will be technical rather than general; reading materials will be primarily non-fiction; history and philosophy will be limited and focused; and emphasis will be placed on how students learn rather than acquisition of facts
- teachers will become facilitators of group projects and discussions rather than classroom leaders and producers of information – students will collaboratively determine what they should learn and what the correct answers are
These intentions sound good. But like every process change, the devil is in the details. There are so many unanswered questions: if content is homogenized, how will students learn special and individual skills? If the primary instruction model is group work, will introverted students be left behind, or will competitive students be held back? Are we abandoning the building-block approach to knowledge that has traditionally established the foundation for higher learning? Are elementary students capable of determining what they should learn? Will schools cut back on the foo-foo to allow the necessary time to make this work?
And perhaps the biggest question of all: will parents, teachers and local school boards have any control over content, or will our schools become federal government factories spitting out ideologically cloned kids? Look back to pre-war Germany to see how dangerous top-down control of education can be. Defenders of Common Core insist that there will be a great deal of local control. Have you seen any yet? All decisions to this point have been made by a small, elite cadre of educational theorists, government wonks, and profiteers lined up at the Bill Gates money trough.
North Carolina Lt. Governor Dan Forest has it right – he says let’s slow down and take a good, hard look at Common Core before we just jump in, with no questions asked:
As a school board trustee I barged in and studied Common Core up close and personal, alongside the teachers. Although they had no choice in the matter (the train had left the station), many of them were not sold on the idea. An article in Education Week illustrates just how tough the leap from “zero to ten” is going to be. More teachers are now speaking out, and questions about Common Core are beginning to appear in the mainstream media.
Supporters of Common Core say conservative critics are uninformed and unnecessarily cautious – we are roadblocks to progress. We need hope and immediate change! Don’t ask questions, just trust us!
Sound familiar?
Tom Balek – Rockin’ On the Right Side
So, don’t ask me no questions
And I won’t tell you no lies
So, don’t ask me about my business
And I won’t tell you goodbye
Don’t Ask Me No Questions – Lynyrd Skynyrd
Here’s an EARLY Lynyrd Skynyrd clip (1974, before the plane crash). Look behind them – that’s a SERIOUS back-line of amplifiers!
Don’t Cry for Argentina, Cry for Us
All of this talk about “the fiscal cliff” sounds so sudden, so personal. Like something that happens to you, and me, as individuals. We fall off the cliff, like Wiley Coyote, and it hurts for a minute. Then we are right back chasing the Road Runner.
The dirty little secret is we have screwed things up so badly for the next generation – maybe several generations – that it is beyond the point of repair.
Economics is not a mystery. There is a ton of historical evidence about what happens when you try to goose the economy and stave off debt by printing fiat money – it’s called inflation. Argentina wrote the book on how to create rampant inflation.
In the 1980s the inflation rate in Argentina ran in the triple digits. When it hit 12,000% in 1989, suddenly everybody was broke – even those who worked hard, saved money, and played by the rules. You have money? Big deal! It doesn’t buy anything! All of the predictable ugly behavior occurred – stores were looted, violent protests erupted, and politics devolved into a cesspool of corruption.
In 2001 the IMF bailed out Argentina, preventing bloody revolution. In exchange, there were strings attached: you will manage your economy conservatively, and you will hold inflation to sane levels. Twelve years later, Argentina is on the verge of being tossed out of the IMF, and perhaps the G20 for failing both dictums. Stores are again being looted. Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is accused of “cooking the books” by reporting much lower inflation rates than actual. While government reports claim inflation rates of 8% to 10%, life on the street shows a rate closer to 25%, and accelerating.
Sound familiar?
Our Federal Reserve, in cahoots with our administration, is pretending that we have no inflation in the US. By holding interest rates to near-zero, they “think” they are stimulating the economy and tempering unemployment. But it’s not working. Banks, because of the risk of a rapid increase in interest rates down the road, aren’t loaning money to businesses. Consumers who rely on interest from savings have puckered up. And investors seeking decent returns gobble up riskier investments, building dangerous bubbles just waiting to pop.
Our government is trying the old “cook the books” strategy too. While our administration claims success at creating jobs, our rate of labor force participation declines, and “real unemployment” takes a toll on American workers. Last week 20,000 applicants scrambled after 1,500 available flight attendant jobs at bankrupt American Airlines, who cut 2,200 higher-cost employees in a contract buyout. And another 90,000 Americans chose permanent disability over the fight for jobs in December – breaking another record and holding unemployment rates conveniently and artificially low.
We are told that there is no inflation in the US. But anyone who has been to a grocery store, a gas station, or any other destination not frequented by beltway-insiders knows better. I freaked when I recently saw plain old hamburger at $6 a pound at a discount supermarket.
In 2001, Pat Buchanan wrote a blistering and revealing article about the debacle in Argentina.
It is a catastrophe for South America’s second economy and nation. Four years deep in recession, with unemployment at 18 percent, tax revenues vanishing and credit rating ruined, Argentina will now resort to the printing press. Fiat money – a “third currency,” the “argentino” – will be introduced in January.
“Printing money to satisfy the popular desire for spending unmatched by taxation is a recipe for chaos,” warns the Financial Times. “The new currency would then swiftly disappear into the hyper-inflationary flames.” Rely upon it. For the Peronists are less concerned with chaos than victory in the March elections.
For this disaster, Argentinians are, themselves, to blame. They have repeatedly elected demagogues and wastrels who misruled and looted their nation.
His scary prediction came true then for Argentina. We’re next.
Who will write our epitaph? And will our children and grandchildren forgive us?
Tom Balek – Rockin’ On the Right Side
Have I said to much?
There’s nothing more I can think of to say to you
But all you have to do
Is look at me to know
That every word is true
Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina (Evita) – Madonna
Tom Balek - Rockin' On The Right Side 