Awesome. From the Stewart/Colbert rally…
How Do You Know If Your Councilman Is A Moron?
August 23, 2010 4 Comments
He says things like this:
But if we hope to continue to attract world class businesses and corporations to Dallas and avoid bigger cuts in future budgets, the answer is clear: We must increase taxes in order to preserve and enhance the quality of life for all our residents.
Seriously.
This is the kind of ignorance of basic business 101 that rivals former Dallas City Councilman Leo Chaney, who once told me that investors would build another Mockingbird Station in his district if only he got the area zoned for it. Never mind things like demographics, traffic, demand, or any of the other fundamentals retail developers weigh.
Every time there’s a budget crunch, they cut the kind of services that anger people enough to where they accept a tax increase — cutting library hours, community pools, park maintenance.
What they don’t do is cut, or don’t cut enough, is where it counts — city payroll and civil service pensions.
Oh, and how’s that $500 million city-owned hotel working out? Glad they’re spending half a billion smackers on that?
Concluded: The Stimulus is an Epic Fail
May 27, 2010 20 Comments
It’s been proven time and again that FDR’s New Deal actually worsened the Great Depression. Keynesian economics just don’t work, not matter what trollish hacks like Paul Krugman preach.
Now a study from Harvard Business School shocks its very authors, who are surprised to find that increased government spending results in increased unemployment.
Recent eesearch at Harvard Business School began with the premise that as a state’s congressional delegation grew in stature and power in Washington, D.C., local businesses would benefit from the increased federal spending sure to come their way.
It turned out quite the opposite. In fact, professors Lauren Cohen, Joshua Coval, and Christopher Malloy discovered to their surprise that companies experienced lower sales and retrenched by cutting payroll, R&D, and other expenses. Indeed, in the years that followed a congressman’s ascendancy to the chairmanship of a powerful committee, the average firm in his state cut back capital expenditures by roughly 15 percent, according to their working paper, “Do Powerful Politicians Cause Corporate Downsizing?â€
“It was an enormous surprise, at least to us, to learn that the average firm in the chairman’s state did not benefit at all from the unanticipated increase in spending,†Coval reports.
So, you wonder why unemployment is so high and this recession has lasted twice as long as normal recessions?
Here’s why.
Did I do that?
This Seems Familiar
April 2, 2010 11 Comments
Isn’t this pretty much in line with the current administration’s agenda?
(Parentheticals are my own paraphrasing)
————————————-
Democracy would be wholly valueless if it were not immediately used as a means for putting through measures … ensuring the livelihood of the people. The main measures, emerging as the necessary result of existing relations, are the following:
- Limitation of private property through progressive taxation, heavy inheritance taxes.
- Gradual expropriation of landowners, industrialists, railroad magnates and shipowners … through competition by state industry
- (Civil asset forfeiture)
- Organization of labor in factories and workshops, with competition among the workers being abolished and with the factory owners, in so far as they still exist, being obliged to pay the same high wages as those paid by the state. (National Card Check)
- Centralization of money and credit in the hands of the state through a national bank
- Increase in the number of national factories (Nationalization of banks, the auto industry, medicine)
- Education of all children, from the moment they can leave their mother’s care, in national establishments at national cost.
- Concentration of all means of transportation in the hands of the nation. (Public transportation, high-speed rail, light rail)
It is impossible, of course, to carry out all these measures at once. But one will always bring others in its wake. Once the first radical attack on private property has been launched, the people will find itself forced to go ever further, to concentrate increasingly in the hands of the state all capital, all agriculture, all transport, all trade.
All the foregoing measures are directed to this end; and they will become practicable and feasible, capable of producing their centralizing effects to precisely the degree that the people, through its labor, multiplies the country’s productive forces.
———————-
Hmmm.
John Jay Myers Takes on Michael Moore
March 29, 2010 8 Comments
Also, is it just me, or does Michael Moore increasingly look like a middle-aged lesbian? IJS.
The Party of No Has Too Many Saying Yes, Please
February 22, 2010 7 Comments
If Dallas people want a streetcar, we should pay for it. We shouldn’t stick our nose in the troth trough and ask the rest of America to support our pet projects. Thanks, Pete. You have a little slop on your collar, there.
The National Republican Congressional Committee, led by Texas Representative Pete Sessions, released a video montage of clips edited to show a series of news anchors and commentators asking “Where are the jobs?â€
Sessions, who called the stimulus “a massive spending binge by the Democrat-controlled Congress,†wrote LaHood three times last September and October. Sessions promoted four projects, including a Dallas streetcar line he said “will create jobs in the region and improve the quality of life for North Texans.†The project got $23 million.
Sessions, in an e-mail, called the stimulus an “abject failure” and said he’d vote against it again if he could.
The lawmaker said his objections don’t keep him “from asking federal agencies for their full consideration of critical infrastructure and competitive grant projects for North Texas when asked to do so by my constituents.†Sessions has written agencies supporting six other grants, spokeswoman Emily Davis said.
In Post-Obama America
January 15, 2010 13 Comments
It’s not, to cop the cliche, that “the honeymoon is over” for Mr. Obama. It’s that his presidency is, effectively, over.
I’ll skip the overused “emperor has no clothes” and the “you can fool some of the people some of the time” points, and just leave it at this: he’s done.
The election of 2008 wasn’t a triumph for the leftist agenda. (I refuse to cede the word “liberal” to them, and there’s nothing “progressive” about believing in an political economic system that was proven not to work 70 years ago.) It was a rejection of President Bush.
And good that rejection was. Mr. Bush was not a small government, pro-market conservative. Government and regulations grew under him faster than they did under any president since FDR.
People didn’t want any more of the Bush/Republican brand, but that didn’t mean they were embracing the left’s agenda. It was a perfect storm for an empty suit like Obama, who had no record and absolutely no accomplishments, and thus could talk about fiscal discipline and responsibility to the point he even got support from some prominent conservatives. He could tell people what they wanted to hear and, unlike the other Democrat candidates, he had few votes and no legislation bearing his name that anyone could say contradicted whatever the line of the day was.
But now it’s a year later. The soaring sweet talk people fell for then falls on deaf ears now. People see behind the curtain and realize there’s no there, there. The Nobel Prize pretty much put an underline on this whole farce.
People have seen his scheme for the government takeover of healthcare, and they’re saying they don’t want it. (The continued push for some foothold, in any form, for government health care proves that socialized medicine is, in fact, the “crown jewel of socialism.” They just want some kind of framework they can add to later. Once they get people thinking health care is a right and not a service like any other, they’ve changed the mindset. This is why Democrats are risking their House majority and safe Senate seats for ObamaCare.)
People have seen that all the bailouts and stimulus — which will be billed to people not even born yet — has not only failed to stimulate; it’s made the recession worse. Recessions only last this long when government monkeys with the economy. The “smartest guys in the room” are wrecking the economy by trying to save it. They can’t see that nothing is “too big to fail.”
Cap and trade is, thankfully, DOA. People have awoken to the fact that they’ve been hoodwinked by unscrupulous, agenda-driven junk science, and that hey — they really haven’t established that anything man has done is affecting global temperatures. Certainly not enough to go sticking a samurai sword into the belly of the economy as a “just in case” measure.
Almost a year ago — the day of the inauguration — I declared Mr. Obama’s presidency a failure. I wasn’t entirely kidding. The new president was entirely a creature of the campaign — all speeches, no action. All theory, no real world experience. A year has proven that his presidency was pretty much doomed the day he started governing.
Hype and marketing can close a deal — especially when your last purchase was such a lemon. But the empty promises and the false hopes that were peddled make the buyer’s remorse all the more powerful.
Dallas Gets All Roofie Dropper on Private Land Owner
January 6, 2010 4 Comments
The City of Dallas is eying private property and, like a guy with a pocketful of roofies, isn’t going to let a simple “no” stand in its way.
It’s a small rectangle of asphalt 25 feet wide and hardly big enough to squeeze a tractor-trailer on. It sits on Young Street, just west of Lamar Street, and is surrounded on three sides by walls protecting the construction site of the city’s convention center hotel.
The land isn’t needed to build the hotel. But it will be necessary for City Hall’s larger vision of a development complete with shops and restaurants and rail lines.
And even though they’re trying to lawyer their way around state law which prohibits theft of real estate eminent domain for economic development, they’ve already admitted the truth.
But city officials acknowledge the land would help support the hotel project, and there’s little question the hotel project is about economic development.
I thought we’d had enough of this nonsense after Kelo which, as a project, ended about the same way the government-run hotel will, if every case study in history is correct.