Mark Noonan

On, Wisconsin!

June 5, 2012June 5, 2012Mark Noonan22 Comments

According to the polls, Walker will be re-elected (is that the proper term for surviving a recall?) today by the voters of Wisconsin – by 5 to 10 percentage points, depending on which poll you believe (I tend towards the higher margin of victory – not because a poll says so, but because the dynamics of the race are showing increasing GOP support and a collapse of Democrat support). While various liberal pundits and power brokers have spent the last week or so downplaying the significance of the Wisconsin result the fact remains that the American left poured everything it had in to Wisconsin – first to try and prevent Walker’s reforms from being enacted then in an attempt to undo them, with this recall vote today just being the last gasp. After all this effort if Walker survives, then this is the death knell for the American left.

The left, since the 1930’s, has used the government to fund the increasing power of the left. Public sector unions are just this sort of thing on steroids – such unions lobby themselves (essentially) on whether or not government will get bigger while they also ensure that anyone who plays ball with Big Government and the left gets rewarded with wealth and/or political power. The real reason that government never gets smaller is because the government funds (on a gigantic scale) a vast army of lobbyists who work night and day against the concept of reducing government. As long as public sector unions have unfettered power to draw money from government workers and use it in support of those politicians who are willing to increase the power and size of government (and thus the power and size of the public sector unions, as well as other leftist groups), so will government continue to grow. While Walker’s reforms did a lot of things the most important aspect of it was to liberate the workers of Wisconsin government from a de-facto requirement to be a member of the union.

As was reported a few days back, public sector union membership has collapsed in Wisconsin – all due to Walker’s reform which took away the union’s power to deduct dues automatically from and employees pay. Now the unions have to rely on voluntary subscription…and the workers are showing they want nothing to do with the union. It was this which really impelled the leadership of the left to go ballistic. While rank and file liberals are still convinced that Walker just hates workers, the union bosses know that the real issue is whether or not workers like the union. Events are showing that they don’t – and each person who quits the union takes one more bit of power from the union. The power to influence elections and lobby for ever larger government is ebbing away from the unions, and thus from the overall left.

This is for the whole ball of wax. If Walker wins, then the public sector unions are on the ropes – and it then becomes only a matter of time, given our budget crisis, that the rest of government funding for the left goes to the chopping block. Think about this – the taxpayers provide a great deal of money for Planned Parenthood. PP spends a great deal of money not only advancing abortion, as a cause, but also attacking Republicans in service of their cause. Boiled down – though PP pretends to keep the funds separate – the tax dollars of pro-life Americans are being used to fund the political advancement of pro-abortion Americans. On and on it goes through a whole host of groups…all of them leftist, all of them getting all or part of their funding from the taxpayers, all of them advancing causes which most of the taxpayers oppose. With fear of the unions gone, more and more politicians will be willing to slaughter liberal sacred cows to balance the budget.

So, get ready first off for a lot of fun tonight – watching crestfallen liberals and making fun of their increasingly bizarre attempts to spin this as not a loss, at all. But then watch them come blazing back on the attack, knowing that if Obama goes down to defeat, there will be nothing stopping the federal government from duplicating Walker’s efforts.

UPDATE: So far reports indicate a very high turnout.

UPDATE II: Still many reports of high turnout and some indications of Democrat ballot box stuffing efforts. Drudge is saying that early exits indicate Walker by 5 – which is doubly encouraging because it appears that Democrat areas had the higher turnout early on. It will be what it will be – and I expect Walker will win as his victory margin will be outside the Democrat “margin of fraud”.

Doomed to an Economic Depression?

June 1, 2012Mark Noonan33 Comments

Lots of bad news out there, today – US unemployment rate rose to 8.2%, Eurozone unemployment rose to 11% (ours is probably right there, too, but the Eurocrats haven’t, it seems, figured out how to fudge numbers as well as Obama’s Bureau of Labor Statistics has), a host of bad news out of China indicates a possible “hard landing” for that economy, which will take Australia and Canada (major commodity suppliers to China) down with it, what amounts to a bank run in Greece and the start of one in Spain…and, yesterday, I read an article which I hope was a bald-faced lie because it says the derivatives market (something I don’t fully understand but from what I can gather it is nothing but a bunch of ponzi scheme garbage) is leveraged to 10 times global GDP…and there’s simply nothing to back all that garbage up. So, are we doomed to a Depression?

The answer is “yes” and, also, “it started in 2008”. For you liberals out there, this will provide you a bit of comfort: Obama is not at fault for it. On the downside, though, just about everything he has done has ensured that it not only won’t get fixed, but will actually get worse. He hasn’t been alone in this, of course – Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve (as well as other central bankers around the world) has piled on the harm with all his money printing. The problems of the global economy are as follows:

The world uses fake money – money just printed up by central banks and backed by nothing. Fake money allows insolvent banks and governments to keep themselves afloat but it works out to the systematic stealing of the money of wealth-creators. If you work hard today and earn a dollar what will happen is a 100th of a penny of it will be stolen tomorrow…that 100th of a penny isn’t so bad, but after 10 years it works out to quite a lot of the dollar you earned. Fake money essentially allows failure to be masked – what is economically counter-productive can be kept going because you can keep passing fake money through it. That you are all the while eroding the entire economy does not show up for a while, but show up it will.

We allow governments to pile up debt. Government debt is not an “investment”. An investment is when you take some of your own money and provide it to someone else who has worked out a plan to generate more wealth than was put in to it. So, I have $100,000.00 and I see some guy in a garage with what I think will be a great product and I give the $100,000.00 to him to start up manufacturing – next year, the guy in a garage is a guy in a factory and he pays me back $125,000.00 while he, himself, is worth $250,000.00. Government spending can provide some useful things, of course, but even when it does it isn’t like that. A road facilitates commerce but it doesn’t actually return money on the money spent. If the government spends a billion dollars building a new road its not like the government will get 1.5 billion dollars back on it next year. True, the economic activity stimulated by the good road will result in a broader tax base but its still not an “I loan you money for your wealth-producing enterprise and I get paid back with interest while your wealth-producing enterprise just goes on and on making more and more wealth”. So, even in the best of circumstances (a needed road), government spending is not an investment; even less so is government spending an investment when it goes in to things like high paid bureaucrats, subsidies to favored groups, welfare, etc, etc, etc. It still might be something desired overall but it isn’t an investment.

Even worse, though, when the government spending is not out of current revenues but is borrowed against future revenues. When we spend tomorrow’s money today on government we are not only not investing but we are de-investing…because every cent borrowed by the government is a cent which can’t be borrowed by persons and enterprises in the private economy who would use that borrowing to create new or expanded sources of wealth creation. Whatever benefit you might get from such borrowing will be short lived, at best, and may actually harm the economy because the money borrowed by government is all too often to be wasted by the sundry sorts of graft common to government.

What started in 2008 and continues to this day – masked by a gigantic amount of fake money and government debt – is the logical and easily predicted outcome of a system which has at its bottom fake money and government debt. I’m only astounded that it has kept going as long as it has. Shows the power of people to blind themselves to reality – and our short-sightedness. We listen with amusement to tales of what prices used to be…never thinking for a moment that, hey, the reason prices used to be lower is that our money was worth more and what the heck happened to our money? It is when we create wealth that we get prosperous – when, that is, we make, mine and grow things. Nothing else does it. 10,000 law degrees, 100 government departments and bureaus and the next 50 social media sites – not a single bit of wealth being created. The next time a farmer plants a corn crop? Wealth created. The next time a miner digs in the earth? Wealth created. The next time someone makes a pair of pliers? Wealth created.

In order for this wealth creation to happen we mush have three things:

1. Investment money for wealth-creators to start up or expand their wealth creating enterprises.

2. Reliable money which holds its value over time so that investors can safely invest for long term wealth creation (fake money, on the other hand, moves investors to protect their wealth by looking for the highest rate of short term gain).

3. A tax and regulatory system which encourages money to flow in to wealth creating enterprises while laying the burden of proof for new regulations upon those who would impose them (not, as now, simply imposing them and then asking the victims to prove they aren’t necessary).

Investment money will primarily come from paying down government debt. We’ve got $15 trillion of potential investment money sitting in the form of US government bonds. Entirely wasted there – we need to balance our budget as swiftly as possible so that each year more and more of the $15 trillion becomes available to the private economy.

Reliable money would best come from returning to the gold standard but people have been so relentlessly propagandized against such currency that it would be a hard sell. Our best option, for now, is to require Congressional action for increasing the supply of money – whatever we do, don’t leave in the hands of central bankers to go “cntrl-p” whenever their Bankster buddies are in trouble.

As you can easily see, neither of those things can be fixed as long as liberals have any say in the matter, let alone any real efforts to tackle tax and regulatory reform. Essentially, fixing the problem requires a clean sweep of our liberal Democrats – though even if we did that we’d have no end of trouble from the RINOs. What needs to be done to fix things, after all, is the gutting of a politico-economic which the current beneficiaries don’t want to let go. A long, hard war is required – but we take each battle as it comes. The first one comes on November 6th – then we can start actually fixing our economy and emerging from the Depression.

The Bankrupt States of America

May 24, 2012Mark Noonan53 Comments

From USA Today:

…The big difference between the official deficit and standard accounting: Congress exempts itself from including the cost of promised retirement benefits. Yet companies, states and local governments must include retirement commitments in financial statements, as required by federal law and private boards that set accounting rules.

The deficit was $5 trillion last year under those rules. The official number was $1.3 trillion. Liabilities for Social Security, Medicare and other retirement programs rose by $3.7 trillion in 2011, according to government actuaries, but the amount was not registered on the government’s books… (emphasis added)

The report goes on to note, among other things, that for Social Security to be solvent we’d need to have $22.2 trillion set aside and earning interest. Clearly, that is an impossible sum – we don’t have it and we can’t get it, ever. And that is just Social Security – it doesn’t count the cost of Medicare, Medicaid, the upcoming ObamaCare bill, other entitlements and, of course, all the other bloated, wasteful spending which is built in to our government. And it entirely leaves aside the amount of debt our State and local governments have accrued. The bottom line: the United States is bankrupt.

For now, we’re able to play around with this – pretend, that is, that we’re not bankrupt and that money will be there for everything. But the reality is there – Paul Ryan is right: we’re heading for the most predictable financial disaster in human history. Unless we take charge of our nation and reform our taxing, spending and regulations, we’re doomed to an economic wipe out which will make the Great Depression seem like small potatoes. If you want to see where we’re heading, look at Greece…and land of riots, bank runs and a government which can’t even pony up for the prescription drugs they promised the people of Greece; and I don’t mean “having trouble paying”…the Greek government simply stopped paying for the drugs. They are out of money.

We’re probably three to five years away from that point…maybe as many as 7 years if we really go flat out with money-printing and financial gimmicks (which would also be disastrous in terms of rapid inflation and other dislocations). But unless we fundamentally change how things are done, we’re doomed sooner or later (and I think sooner – the latest data from Europe and China indicates they are in recession and I bet we’ve been in recession for a couple months now, but the data are being fudged…they were being fudged in Europe and, especially, China, too…but you can’t “hide the decline” forever). This is why November 6th is so crucial – a re-elected Obama, even if he’s set with a fully GOP Congress, simply will not make any move to disturb business as usual. Even if he’s not able to increase spending the fact that we won’t have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate will prevent any budget from being passed…and we’ll be saddled with year after year of “continuing resolutions” which lock in place the bonanza of extra spending Reid and Pelosi piled on in 2009. Obama must go if America is to avoid catastrophe.

Romney, on the other hand, is enough of a business man to know we can’t go on like this – and while he might want to compromise more with the left than we’d like, an increasingly conservative/libertarian Congress will ensure that a lot of really good policies are enacted. Additionally, the force of circumstances will push Romney and the Congress towards the radical solutions needed. It won’t do anyone any good getting a good write-up about bi-partisanship in the Washington Post if failure to act responsibly leads to35% unemployment in 2014. With their backs against the wall, a GOP government has a good chance of doing something worthwhile.

This is serious, good people – we’re in quite a fix and like Obama’s old preacher used to say, “America’s chickens are coming home to roost”. We’ve spent too much for too long while harrying wealth creators with a regressive tax and regulatory system. It is change it, or die.

Gingrich Gets it Right

May 20, 2012May 20, 2012Mark Noonan165 Comments

From CNN:

“I am not for a narrow victory,” he said. “I am for crushing the left in every single way.”

Gingrich was, of course, Matt’s first choice for nominee – he was my 2nd or 3rd (Santorum was always my first). For me, Romney was a bit back there in the pack but always with the understanding that the crucial necessity is to ensure that Obama leaves office on January 20th, 2013.

The capstone for getting rid of Obama came, in my view, just recently – when it was revealed that in 1991 he was described as being born in Kenya. Naturally, the Obamatons leaped to in action when this came out and called it a “mistake”. But I don’t buy that – I call it a lie, instead. Here is the key to Obama: he’ll say or do anything to advance himself. Back when he was just starting out being from an upper class, white Hawaiian family just didn’t cut enough liberal ice – being a foreign born son of a radical anti-British communist! Well, that did the trick quite nicely.

From “composite” girlfriends in his autobiography (which, it would seem, millions of liberal pinheads bought but few read) to joining Wright’s racist church, Obama has merely crafted a narrative for himself as best suited his immediate needs. And the cruelty with which he tosses aside old friends like Wright (say what you will about Wright, but have some sympathy: for 20 years Obama and Wright were close and then Wright got in the way of the newest narrative, and he had to go) is just another indicator of the wrongness of Obama.

I don’t really know what Obama is up to – he’s up to radical leftism, but with what goal in mind, I don’t know: I suspect there isn’t one in the traditional, political sense. All we’re seeing now is yet another narrative, this one designed to get Obama re-elected. After that, he’ll just go on to the next narrative – whatever makes him continue to rise up the ladder in his own estimation. The trouble is that we need a President – someone who cares less about himself and more about the United States. A re-elected Obama will not just pursue stupid, destructive policies, but he’ll also ignore any problem which can’t lead to more glory for Obama – and that is a recipe for national and global catastrophe.

Gingrich sees this – and sees more: Obama must go, but the left as a whole must be crushed. Our only task as conservatives, patriots and Americans from now until November 6th is to beat these people. Because if we don’t, we’re going to pay too high a price for failure.

A Hero Recognized

May 16, 2012Mark Noonan54 Comments

From a White House press release:

On May 16, President Barack Obama will award Specialist Leslie H. Sabo, Jr., U.S. Army, the Medal of Honor for conspicuous gallantry.

Specialist Sabo will receive the Medal of Honor posthumously for his heroic actions in combat on May 10, 1970, while serving as a rifleman in Company D, 3d Battalion, 506th Infantry, 101st Airborne Division in Se San, Cambodia.

On that day, when he and his platoon were ambushed by a large enemy force, Specialist Sabo immediately charged the enemy position, killing several enemy soldiers. He then assaulted an enemy flanking force, successfully drawing their fire away from friendly soldiers and ultimately forcing the enemy to retreat. While securing a re-supply of ammunition, an enemy grenade landed nearby. Specialist Sabo picked it up, threw it, and shielded a wounded comrade with his own body – absorbing the brunt of the blast and saving his comrade’s life. Although wounded by the grenade blast, he continued to charge the enemy’s bunker. After receiving several serious wounds from automatic weapons fire, he crawled towards the enemy emplacement and, when in position, threw a grenade into the bunker. The resulting explosion silenced the enemy fire, but also ended Specialist Sabo’s life. His indomitable courage and complete disregard for his own safety saved the lives of many of his platoon members.

Specialist Sabo’s widow, Rose Mary Sabo-Brown and his brother, George Sabo, will join the President at the White House to commemorate his example of selfless service and sacrifice.

We are a nation as long as we can find men like Sabo among us.

The Easiest Prediction in the World: That Liberals Will Fail

May 12, 2012Mark Noonan55 Comments

First off, a blast from the past – January 1st, 2011:

…the Californians wanted it. People get the government they deserve, and they usually get it good and hard. California is America’s Greece and when the collapse hits, hopefully a majority will wake up to the fact that liberalism is a failure.

And, now – from the New York Times:

The state budget shortfall in California has increased dramatically in the last six months, forcing state officials to assemble a series of new spending cuts that are likely to mean further reductions to schools, health care and other social programs already battered by nearly five years of budget retrenchment, state officials announced on Saturday.

Gov. Jerry Brown, disclosing the development in a video posted on YouTube, said that California’s shortfall was now projected to be $16 billion, up from $9.2 billion in January. Mr. Brown said that he would propose a revised budget on Monday to deal with it…

Given that this is the New Y0rk Times, you do have to be careful – the budget shortfall didn’t “increase dramatically”; it was built in. When Jerry and the liberals of the California legislature passed their budget they made a whole bunch of absurd assumptions both as to revenues and expenditures…that they would be, respectively, much higher and much lower than what has actually happened. Any real analyst would have predicted this right from the start – or, even, just a moderately informed amateur, like me.

The key to understanding what is wrong with America is to understand three things:

1. We spend too much money via government.

2. Our debt is too large to be managed given our current ability to create wealth.

3. Our ability to create wealth is hampered endlessly by the tax and regulatory system.

All three of these problems are liberal-created problems: it is liberals who want to spend too much (yes, plenty of Republicans join in, but liberals always lead the way…as is shown by the fact that they increased federal spending by a trillion per year since Obama took office). Because we spend too much, we end up borrowing too much – and now our debt (federal, State and local) is so large that, given our current base of wealth, it simply cannot be repaid (when you factor in the un-funded mandates). Our only way out of this mess is to cut spending and grow wealth – but we can’t grow wealth effectively because liberals have erected a positively Byzantine tax and regulatory system which rewards failure and punishes effort and success.

Liberalism must go if America is to survive. Remember this as we approach November.

The Crusades, Reconsidered

May 5, 2012Mark Noonan44 Comments

From an excerpt of Jonah Goldberg’s new book, Tyranny of Cliches’:

…Until fairly recently, historically speaking, Muslims used to brag about being the winners of the Crusades, not the victims of it. That is if they talked about them at all. “The Crusades could more accurately be described as a limited, belated and, in the last analysis, ineff ectual response to the jihad—a failed attempt to recover by a Christian holy war what had been lost to a Muslim holy war,” writes Bernard Lewis, the greatest living historian of Islam in the English language (and perhaps any language). Historian Thomas Madden puts it more directly, “Now put this down in your notebook, because it will be on the test: The crusades were in every way a defensive war. They were the West’s belated response to the Muslim conquest of fully two-thirds of the Christian world.”…

You can, of course, bring up some bad things which happened during the Crusades – most notably the massacre of the both the Muslim and Jewish population of Jerusalem when the Christians took the city in 1099 as well as Richard the Lionheart’s massacre of 2,700 Muslims at Acre during the Third Crusade. Bad things. Should not have been done. No decent person in 2012 would ever contemplate doing any such thing. But, by the standards of 11th and 12th century warfare, not at all remarkable. And any Muslim who wants to whine about it is directed to what Muslims did when they took Constantinople in 1453…many centuries later, when we were all supposed to be much more civilized.

So, I leave aside such complaints – war is always nasty and the hard men of the 11th and 12th centuries, on both sides, did many a cruel act. But the main facts cannot be disputed: the Crusades were a counter-attack. The Muslim attack upon Christianity began, entirely unprovoked, in 634 when some rapacious Muslim barbarians from the Arabian peninsula launched what was at first no more than a large scale plunder raid in to Christian Syria. Quickly noticing how weak the Christian forces were (the Christian government of the area – the Byzantine Empire – was greatly weakened by a recently concluded, 20 year long war with Persia), the Muslims just poured in to a military vacuum. For centuries thereafter, Muslim armies conquered Christian lands, massacred and enslaved Christians, treated Christians like dirt when they didn’t murder or enslave them and generally acted like pirates. Europe was weak from the 7th to the 10th century as the new, Christian civilization developed upon the debris of the old Greco-Roman civilization…and that build up was hampered by the “barbarian wars” which absorbed the energy of Europe often over a period of centuries. Because of this, the Christians could do no more than hold on…once Europe recovered a bit, there was a chance to push back…and it wasn’t just a push in to the middle east (though that was by far the more famous part), but also a push against the Muslims in Spain.

The only thing bad about the Crusades was that they ultimately failed – they did not extirpate the Mohammedan heresy. And it is high time that people started to learn the truth about the Crusades.

The Ryan Budget and Catholic Social Teaching

April 30, 2012Mark Noonan42 Comments

The American Catholic has an excellent round of commentary on the Ryan budget and the ensuing debate carried out on the question, “is the Ryan budget in accordance with Catholic social teaching, or not?”. While this might seem an arcane debate for only Catholics to engage, the fact is that the debate is ultimately about what sort of America we will have.

There are two words everyone has to familiarize themselves with:

1. Subsidiarity.

2. Solidarity.

In a nutshell, “subsidiarity” is the Catholic teaching that all decisions should be made as far as possible at the lowest level. This covers all sorts of decisions – political, economic and religious. While the higher authorities play a vital role, their role is rather one of support and instruction rather than mixing in the day to day activities of life. It is for you and me, dear reader, to take care of the poor in our midst – just as it is our duty to work and earn our own living; it is for the federal government to assist us in this – mostly by ensuring law and order, the execution of justice and our common defense against outside enemies; but, also, at times by directly aiding us when our own good, solid efforts are insufficient to secure what is necessary for the liberty, safety and dignity of ourselves and our fellows.

And that leads us in to “solidarity” – none of us is an island; we are not a law unto our selves. We are part of a group and while we have absolute rights vis a vis the group, we also have absolute responsibilities to the group. We do, indeed, have a right to our property and the fruits of our labor – but we also have a duty to ensure that our neighbor does not lack the necessities.

Liberals tend to concentrate on the “solidarity” aspect and use it as a justification for the welfare State. Libertarians tend to concentrate on “subsidiarity” and use it as a justification for government so small as to be incapable of doing the genuine tasks of government (especially in terms of ensuring justice and the defense of the nation). Paul Ryan’s plan is a judicious mix of subsidiarity and solidarity – as it should be, because while the laws of God are absolute, the actions of human beings within the parameters of those laws are subject to many varying pressures and needs and thus prudential judgement is needed in each particular instance in figuring out what is best. Neither libertarianism nor statism is the answer – in some cases the State must take a strong stand, in others the State must butt out…in most cases it has to be a little of both.

Ryan is being furiously attacked, especially by liberal Catholics who see in the Ryan budget the moral justification for dismantling the welfare State. They are attacking Ryan’s plan because they say it will harm the poor – but the fact is the plan wouldn’t do anything of the sort; it would, though, harm the vested interests of the welfare State who do little for the poor, but seem to make quite a lot of money ostensibly caring about the poor. But do have a care – if Ryan’s budget is ever passed (say in January, 2013 and then signed in to law by President Romney) then the attacks will start to come from the other side – libertarians who will be upset that the State refuses to become morally neutral and still seeks to have a role in American affairs.

While Ryan’s plan has a great deal of Catholicism in it (no surprise given Ryan’s Catholicism), it really brings up and clarifies the real debate – super welfare State, libertarian anarchy, or a well reasoned approach which understands that things don’t resolve themselves in perfect, little boxes? The whole of the American experiment – our whole Constitutional order (currently hibernating) – is based upon the Founders’ realization that (a) no one has all the answers and (b) a wise system will leave great latitude for individual and local action while still retaining a government strong enough to act forcefully when necessary.

We’ll see how it comes out – but Ryan has earned the gratitude of all Americans who wish to see the Founders’ vision restored to America.

100k Wounded Warrior Bike Ride

April 28, 2012Mark Noonan51 Comments

From Everything Lubbock:

The president is hosting the 100k Wounded Warrior Bike Ride, a ride dedicated to military members wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Riding with veterans who have overcome an injury is not only an honor it is a huge inspiration,” President George W. Bush said.

For the second day in a row the former president and his team of wounded warriors dressed down, geared up, and rode across the Palo Duro Canyon today.

All 19 warriors served under the former president and today all 20 of them worked side by side to make it through the trail.

“There are some places where it is very steep and a group of people will wait for me to get there and sort of push me up a hill,” warrior Dan Gade said.

Sergeant Major Chris Self said wounded warriors are proof that obstacles should never stand in your way…

These are the best of the best and President Bush hasn’t forgotten them. Neither should the rest of us. Go here if you’d like to help out a Wounded Warrior.

Blogs For Victory

Where Defeat Is Not An Option

Author: Mark Noonan