Reagan vs the Statist Clowns

Here's a very nice video mixing powerful statements by Ronald Reagan with the incoherent ramblings of the buffoons now in charge of Washington.

Bush, Pelosi, and Reid Deserve Scorn for Destroying Jobs for Teenagers

Anybody with an IQ above room temperature understands that companies only hire workers when they expect to generate net revenue (i.e., the total receipts associated with a new worker are expected to be higher than the total costs). That's why it was so reprehensible for Congress to approve a 40-percent hike in the minimum wage - a step that was guaranteed to kill jobs. The Wall Street Journal's editorial page reports on new research showing 100,000-plus jobs were wiped out. This awful legislation was approved in 2007, and all politicians associated with that choice should be ashamed of themselves.

Economic slowdowns are tough on many job-seekers, but they're especially hard on the young and inexperienced, whose job prospects have suffered tremendously from Washington's ill-advised attempts to put a floor under wages. In a new paper published by the Employment Policies Institute, labor economists William Even of Miami University in Ohio and David Macpherson of Trinity University in Texas find a significant drop in teen employment as a direct result of the minimum wage hikes. The wage hikes were implemented in three stages between 2007 and 2009, and not all states were affected because some already mandated a minimum wage above the federal requirement. But for the 19 states affected by all three stages of the federal wage increase, "there was a 6.9% decline in employment for teens aged 16 to 19," write the authors. And for those who had not completed high school, "we estimated that the hikes reduced employment by 12.4%," which translates to about 98,000 fewer teens in the work force. After isolating for other economic factors and broadening their analysis to include all 32 states affected by any stage of the federal wage increase, the authors conclude that "the federal minimum-wage hikes reduced teen employment by 2.5% translating to approximately 114,400 fewer employed teens."

More Unemployment Is the Key to Stimulus!

Nancy Pelosi is being appropriately mocked for her strange assertion that subsidizing unemployment is a great way to "stimulate" the economy, but keep in mind that this she is just mindlessly regurgitating standard Keynesian theory. Here are two videos. The first is Pelosi's ramblings and the second is my analysis of Keynesian economics. I hope my words are more convincing.

What the Left Really Wants in Health Care

A Denver Post column hits the nail on the head regarding the Obama-Reid-Pelosi healthcare strategy. They will make lots of fake concessions and offer whatever bribes are necessary in order to put in place an infrastructure that inevitably leads to complete government control of the health care sector:

Once Washington gains a toehold — and considering government controls 49 cents on every health care dollar spent, by toehold I mean "bear hug" — it is an inescapable reality that whatever they come up with will be expansive and expensive. That's the message Pelosi was telegraphing to her allies when — in addition to pointing out how itty bitty the bill would be — she added that it would be "big enough" to put the country on a "path" toward sustainable health care reform. The righteous "path," naturally, ends at the gates of a single-payer system. The infrastructure to reach this objective — price controls, new entitlements and wide-ranging mandates — will be set in place once Democrats use reconciliation to pass the bill, deal with the short-term electoral consequences, and let history work itself out. ...Remember that Congress estimated Medicare's cost at $12 billion for 1990 (adjusted for inflation) when the program kicked off in 1965. Medicare cost $107 billion in 1990 and is quickly approaching $500 billion. Who's going to stop it?

Weekly Political Humor, PG Rating

I don't know which is scariest. Probably Biden. Maybe Frank.

Pelosi's Hidden Capital Gains Tax Hike

The punitive class-warfare mentality of the left can be found buried in the healthcare bill. The Wall Street Journal dug deep and found a big capital gains tax increase. Ideally, there should be no double taxation of income that is saved and invested, which means the right tax rate is zero. Boosting the rate from 15 percent to 25.4 percent is a big step in the wrong direction, and almost surely will lose revenue (and definitely will undermine growth):

Our job is to read bad legislation so you don't have to, and on that score we may demand combat pay for plowing our way through the House health-care bill that passed on Saturday. ...House Democrats are funding their new entitlement with a 5.4% surtax on incomes above $500,000 for individuals and above $1 million for joint filers. The surcharge is intended to snag the greatest number of taxpayers to raise some $460.5 billion, and so the House has written it to apply to modified adjusted gross income. That means it includes both capital gains and dividends. That surtax takes effect on January 1, 2011, or the day the Bush tax rates of 2001 and 2003 expire. Today's capital gains tax rate of 15% would bounce back to 20% because of the Bush repeal and then to 25.4% with the surtax. That's a 69% increase, overnight.

Obamacare Will Be a Budget Buster

This video provides 12 reasons in less than 7 minutes.

Pelosi's Bureaucratic Maze

Republicans usually are not very creative, so I'm uncharacteristically impressed that they have come up with a devastating chart showing the bureaucratic nightmare that will be created (on top of the current mess) for health care.

Congressman Brady of Texas gets an award for the best one-liner, saying about the Pelosi plan that "If the IRS and Medicare had a baby, it would look like this."

For a closer look, click this PDF link.

The VAT Threat Is Real...and Growing

Less than two weeks ago, this blog discussed how one of Obama's main political allies was arguing for a value-added tax Now Nancy Pelosi is adding her shrill voice to the mix. The left's agenda is rather clear. They need this giant new consumption tax if they want to keep making government bigger. This is a serious threat - especially since there are a handful of Republicans who would be tempted to go along with the idea because they foolishly think that a VAT will help exports (I explained why this is preposterous in a Wall Street Journal column, which can be read here). Here's a story from The Hill with some of the details:

A new value-added tax (VAT) is "on the table" to help the U.S. address its fiscal liabilities, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Monday night. ...The VAT is a tax on manufacturers at each stage of production on the amount of value an additional producer adds to a product. Pelosi argued that the VAT would level the playing field between U.S. and foreign manufacturers, the latter of which do not have pension and healthcare costs included in the price of their goods because their governments provide those services, financed by similar taxes. "They get a tax off of that and they use that money to pay the healthcare for their own workers," Pelosi said, using the example of auto manufacturers. "So their cars coming into our country don't have a healthcare component cost. "Somewhere along the way, a value-added tax plays into this. Of course, we want to take down the healthcare cost, that's one part of it," the Speaker added. "But in the scheme of things, I think it's fair look at a value-added tax as well."