Tired of all the out-sourcing? Wonder why all our stuff is made in China? Well, Jeff Pope over at Pajamas Media brings up the real reason our manufacturing base is being crushed – and it applies equally well to our mining and agricultural industries:

* Companies used to have personnel clerks whose primary function was to make sure employees were paid accurately, vacation time was accounted for, and payroll tax deductions were made. They have been replaced by multitudes of advanced-degreed and six-figure paid HR professionals. We have diversity audits, sensitivity training, gender awareness programs, and all manner of support and grievance processes. As a result, every employee must be treated as a potential minefield of liability — an artificially generated risk managed at great expense to meet the mandates dictated by government at state and federal levels, and all with reams of accompanying reporting.

* Health insurance that used to focus primarily on illness and injury now, by state and federal mandate, covers all manner of other costs such as smoking cessation, obesity counseling, gender counseling, drug abuse treatment, depression, mental health, etc. These costs are added on top of the already ballooning cost of basic care by politicians who run to a microphone to announce that they have provided help for your smoking habit — and without raising taxes!

* Environmental regulations that are so extreme that spilling a can of paint thinner becomes an “end of life as we know it” event. Common sense good stewardship long ago lost out to very, very expensive measures frequently unrelated to a real threat. Try breaking a CFL in the middle of an environmentally compliant facility or getting all the permits needed to build a facility that will in any way use chemicals.

* Corporate legal departments used to be primarily involved in contracts and tax preparation. Now add to that whole staffs to either manage litigation or stifle any activity that could lead to liability in the fertile imagination of a tort lawyer. If a stock drops, a label falls off, a risky abuse of the product can conceived of, or any of a thousand other real or imagined risks, a company lawyer is called in to advise. Tort lawyers increasingly attempt to construe personal liability of corporate management in order to pressure them to settle claims, all without constraint from the government or the courts. Protection is expensive, and non-productive.

We’ve tied down the wealth-creating part of our economy with a maze of red tape, lawsuits and political correctness. Our economy is buried under a blizzard of paper. One must realize that we can make a hammer here in the United States just as well as the hammer can be made in China – but they are made in China because once you add up all the costs of doing business in the United States it simply makes more sense to make it in China. In order to revive manufacturing, farming and mining in the United States, we simply must cut out all these additional costs.

We need to go through the entire federal register of regulations and review each one to determine if they really are helpful, or if they’re just mindless bureaucratic mandates put in place to make someone feel good, or allow a politician to claim they did something regarding the political fad of the moment. The safety of the workers must be assured, the quality of the products must be kept high – but we really must get a handle on this or our economy will continue to die.

We also need to go after the lawyers – we’re suing ourselves in to economic oblivion. Every time a lawyer manages to extract money from a company it makes all other companies go in to defensive mode – gumming up the works and making it ever more costly to produce. After a while, this also adds to the incentive of getting out of the United States and shipping the factory over seas.

“Congress shall make no law” should be our watchword for a decade as we reform our economy. We need a Special Assistant to the President for Repeal Affairs; someone who will go through the laws and regulations determining which have to go. Congress should hold hearings bringing the regulators in to testify as to why each and every regulation is vital…and if something isn’t vital, it should be legislated out of existence. The regulators, themselves, should receive statutory instruction that their primary job is to ensure the smooth transaction of business – that, when it doubt, they should let the practice continue until Congress and the President decide otherwise.

If we will free up our economy the growth we’ll see will be phenomenal. And it will be real growth – meaning a real increase in national wealth, year by year, as factories, farms and mines are opened and expanded. There will be jobs for the middle class, again; pressure will be taken off the illegal immigration issue as we once again start to have labor shortages; our national defense will be more secure as we become less dependent upon foreign sources and more capable of producing what we need here at home. There is no downside to this – and only economic death if we keep going as we are.

Tone deaf:

The CIA has launched a taskforce to assess the impact of 250,000 leaked US diplomatic cables. Its name? WikiLeaks Task Force, or WTF for short.

The group will be charged with scouring the released documents to survey damage caused by the disclosures…

Wish we had adults in charge…

So far its been a busy Christmas week and it isn’t going to get any less busy for the next few days – so, not much time for writing, and I’m sorry about that.

So, have at it with this and I’ll try to get more up later.

The Magnificat:

Mary said:

“My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord;

my spirit rejoices in God my savior.

for he has looked upon his lowly servant.

From this day all generations will call me blessed:

the Almighty has done great things for me,

and holy is his Name.

He has mercy on those who fear him

in every generation.

He has shown the strength of his arm,

and has scattered the proud in their conceit.

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones

and has lifted up the lowly.

He has filled the hungry with good things,

and the rich he has sent away empty.

He has come to the help of his servant Israel

for he remembered his promise of mercy,

the promise he made to our fathers,

to Abraham and his children for ever.” – Luke 1:46-55

I feel extra hopey-changey, now – from Reuters:

The U.S. government fell deeper into the red in fiscal 2010 with net liabilities swelling more than $2 trillion as commitments on government debt and federal benefits rose, a U.S. Treasury report showed on Tuesday.

The Financial Report of the United States, which applies corporate-style accrual accounting methods to Washington, showed the government’s liabilities exceeded assets by $13.473 trillion. That compared with a $11.456 trillion gap a year earlier…

It is just staggering to think that we’re that much in debt – and that our debt load is rising that fast. We’ll see how long the banksters and bureaucrats can keep this up, but I’m thinking we’re very close to the end of our rope.

From the Washington Examiner:

Sen. Jim DeMint, R-SC, says Federal Communications Commission should be renamed the “Fabricating a Crisis Commission,” following a vote by the panel’s three Democrats to approve proposed rules that amount to a hostile takeover of the Internet by a government agency acting illegally.

The proposal – misleadingly described by proponents as an attempt to insure “net neutrality” by guaranteeing equal access to the Internet – was introduced a year ago by Julius Genachowski, President Obama’s appointee as FCC chairman.

A federal court has ruled that the commission has no authority to regulate the Internet, and a bipartisan group of senators and representives warned Genechowski not to attempt to impose a regulatory regime on the Internet earlier this year….

It is rather insane for the FCC to do this – the courts and Congress have strongly indicated that the FCC has no business doing this. The only explanation of it is that the Democrats, being by default Statists, just figure they can’t have anything out there being uncontrolled by government. Everyone has access to the internet – heck, if I’m on here, then anyone can be on here.

We must roll this back – and, in fact, this would be an excellent first step in curbing government and starting to re-establish Constitutional government. The liberals on the FCC will rue the day they made this step too far.

From the New York Times:

Senior American military commanders in Afghanistan are pushing for an expanded campaign of Special Operations ground raids across the border into Pakistan’s tribal areas, a risky strategy reflecting the growing frustration with Pakistan’s efforts to root out militants there.

The proposal, described by American officials in Washington and Afghanistan, would escalate military activities inside Pakistan, where the movement of American forces has been largely prohibited because of fears of provoking a backlash…

Pakistan’s ungovernable “tribal areas” are clearly the weak link in our battle against terrorism in that area – but I do wonder if we’re not about to make a mistake here: meaning, are we about to expand our forces in Pakistan to the point where we offend but not expand them enough to ensure a quick suppression of Taliban/al Qaeda activity? As usual in war, if you’re going in, go in all the way…don’t just increase drone and special forces attacks as there will inevitably be a point where we hit the wrong house/village and we’ll have a lot of dead civilians on our hands.

My worry is that this is going to be yet another half-measure by the Obama Administration – an unwillingness to go all out for victory coupled with an unwillingness to lose. You know, a quagmire…

Ed Morrissey notes a 60 Minutes report about the bankruptcy of our States – that the Day of Reckoning is here. This might have come as a shock to some, but not to me and not to anyone who read this blog, or Noonan for Nevada. I’ve been talking about this for months – but I freely admit that I got my first good look at this issue over at Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis as well as some of the articles over at Zero Hedge (both sites have oddball views on some matters, but both also have a highly realistic attitude on economic affairs; I trust economic stuff from them far more than, say, MSNBC or the Wall Street Journal). Some samples of what I’ve been writing about are here, here and here. Nice to see that the MSM is finally picking up on this story – a year or so behind the curve, but what else can we expect from them?

The States have, quite simply, spent themselves in to oblivion – and not only are most of them facing deficits (and some of a quite crushing nature), they’ve also got massive, unfunded liabilities in the form of over-generous pensions to some of the State employees (our cities and counties have similar problems). As Governor Christie puts in the video linked by Morrissey, “we literally don’t have the money” any longer. Its all gone – everything is wrecked and no matter how painful it will be, gigantic cuts in spending will be required.

In fact, the cuts really needed to happen a year or two ago – but various federal bail outs allowed the States to paper over their fiscal cracks and kick the can down the road. The problem is that now its all much worse (more unemployed for a longer time with spreading poverty putting increasing pressure on State and local expenditures at a time when revenues, at best, are just holding steady after precipitous declines) at a time when no more bail outs will be forthcoming – the new GOP-led House simply will not vote themselves in to political suicide by bailing out State and local government.

For some States, this won’t be all that horrible – those States which now have Republican governors coupled with total or partial control of the State legislature by the GOP. It will be a hard road for such States, but they’ll just make the difficult cuts and get on with it. The real problem will come in with those States under Democrat governors coupled with total or partial Democrat control of the legislature – Democrats simply will not want to cut. We can expect that they’ll try various gimmicks to dodge the bullet (the most entertaining bit of this, I think, will come out of California where, God bless the poor people of California, Jerry Brown and the Democrat legislature will try to cover a $28 billion shortfall), but it will avail them nothing. Crunch time is here – you might be able to buy yourself 6 months or a year by fiscal hocus pocus, but no more than that.

We’ll see how this comes out – whether they get it together, or spiral out of control in to our own versions of Greece. The bad news is that the budget cuts will make another hit on employment in America, thus dragging down the economy as a whole, at least in the short to mid-term (economists who are predicting a solid economic rebound in 2011 are either trying to run some sort of scam, or smoking crack). 2011 will be a long but very interesting year – and I have to say, I’m more worried about our economic prospects now than at any time in my life. I wonder if I’ll have a job by next Christmas – or, indeed, if any of those I know will.

From Jim Treacher:

…it’ll give the terrorists yet another reason to hate us. The Gitmo detainees already go out of their minds when addressed directly by a female with her whole face showing. Just think how these 12th-Century dip$#!+s will react when they get their butts kicked by some gay dudes. It’ll just add to the humiliation…

Well, there is that – but to make it really cool, we have to make sure the Islamists know it was a gay man who just handed him his junk on a platter. Pink M-16s? Any ideas?

It is a serious issue – and not given nearly as much attention as it requires:

An Egyptian priest has explained that radical Muslims are trying to rid the Middle East entirely of Christians, who once comprised the largest religious group in the region.

“This is what the Muslim fundamentalists want,” the Egyptian Catholic spokesman Fr. Rafic Greische told Vatican Radio.

“They want the Christians to evacuate from the Middle East and leave. And this is what is happening every day…”

…Egyptian Christians face significant public and private discrimination, including policies that make it nearly impossible for them to build churches. In November, a crowd demonstrating for their right to build a church in Giza clashed with police, who fired on unarmed protesters…

Christians are routinely denied basic rights – and at any moment a Moslem can denounce a Christian to an Islamist court and the Christian really has no chance of defending him or herself from the accusation. Christians are robbed, raped, beaten and murdered. Christian churches and holy sites are desecrated. And no Christian really dare defend himself against a Moslem outrage because that might set off what amounts to a pogrom.

My view is that we should seek separation – set up what amounts to at least autonomous areas where Christians can live under their own laws, and be defended by Christians under arms. This is, I think, the only way to teach the Moslems to respect the rights of Christians…and from respect we can eventually move to cooperation and friendship. But as long as Christians are a despised and powerless minority in the middle east, the Moslem leaders will continue to stir up hatred for their own ends.

UPDATE: The threat sharia poses to our society, internally. Every time an Islamist group gets us to accommodate even the mildest aspect of sharia in our law and customs, it is an erosion of our constitutional republic. This is not like tolerating the peculiarities of Hinduism or what have you – Sharia is a complete world view and even Islamists who are not in any way, shape or form terrorists are determined to impose it everywhere.