Mar 23

More cash-strapped Americans turn to tax refund advances

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If you save anything in modern America, you are an utter fool. The Federal Reserve Bank has set interest rates at near zero for years now, and almost all of the world’s central banks are also pouring out paper currency at near-zero (or below-zero) interest rates.

In the modern world–erected wholly upon a financing model designed to benefit the expansion of government power–savers are punished, while debtors are rewarded. Increasing percentages of Americans (especially Americans at the bottom of the socio-economic structure) are cashing out 401ks, stripping retirement accounts of value, and becoming renters rather than owners.

Now we read that more and more Americans are seeking tax refund advances. The link is here.

And remember that many poor Americans will find in 2015 that even their expected refunds are smaller than ever before, due to the Obamacare penalty.

Stay tuned!

Mar 21

Decades of Extravagant Spending on Public Education Have Produced Few Good Results

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Cato Institute’s Daniel Mitchell describes U.S. spending on public schools in this way: “Never Have so Many Paid so Much to Achieve so Little.” Incredibly, Americans are made to pay more for schooling than the parents of any other society. Yet American students–ranked head to head with students in other countries–perform very poorly. The graph above illustrates how much public spending has achieved so little.

Mar 21

Why do so many U.S. weapons fall into enemy hands? Will We Soon Be Attacked By Them?

Ron Paul

Why do people who call themselves “conservatives” and who claim to advocate “limited government” worship big military? Former Congressman Ron Paul wonders why so many dollars worth of U.S. military weapons have supposedly fallen into the hands of “enemies.” “Building weapons and seeing them end up in the hands of the enemy is almost a routine event,” says Doctor Paul.

A recent headline in Mother Jones read: “US Weapons Have A Nasty Habit of Going AWOL.” The report was about $500 million worth of military equipment that is unaccounted for in Yemen.

It is hard to believe this is attributable to incompetence alone (though all government operations tend to be incompetent).

Is there a darker plot behind these “lost weapon” stories? Will we soon be attacked by weapons we paid for?

Stay tuned. . . .

Mar 20

Virtually all Manmade-Global-Warming Science–Almost All of Which Supports Expanding Government–Has Been Funded by Governments

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According to the book “Merchants of Smear” by Russell Cook, the U.S. government alone spent more than $106 billion in taxpayer funds to research and support alarmist climate research between 2003 and 2010, as well as billions more on ineffective renewable energy boondoggles. Much of the taxpayer-supported alleged scientists refuse to let other scientists, IPCC reviewers, or FOIA investigators view their raw data, computer codes, or computer algorithms. The alarmist “scientists” claim the information is private property, even though taxpayers paid for the work and the results.

Cook’s book also exposes the widely-repeated “97 percent consensus” claim as highly imaginative. The claim, according to Cook, is based on a study by a University of Queensland professor claiming 97 percent of published scientific papers agree humans caused at least half of the 1.3º F (0.7º C) global warming since 1950; in reality, only 41 of the 11,944 papers cited explicitly said this.

Mar 20

A Private-Sector website that directed consumers to different health-insurance options already existed before the Obamacare website flop

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Most of us remember two years ago when the government’s Obamacare website was launched. Americans watched in horror as the website crashed, failed to function and was hacked. At a cost to taxpayers of many tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars.

It was a lesson in how government enterprises perform.

Of course, ANY American with an IQ above 85 could have produced a working website to help consumers identify health-insurance options for less than a million dollars. If he couldn’t do it himself, he could have paid a webmaster to build such a site for, say, a hundred thousand dollars. Almost anyone in the business would have jumped at the opportunity. And the original guy would have pocketed $900,000. ANY AMERICAN COULD HAVE DONE IT FOR A MILLION DOLLARS–and most would have made a handsome profit.

Now we read from former congressman Allen West that THERE ACTUALLY WAS a private-sector website that could do what the Obamacare website failed to do. It was called eHealthInsurance.com.

The ehealthinsurance.com site was in the business of helping consumers find health insurance options on their own. The private-sector site had built-in security protections to keep consumers’ confidential information private. And it was free or cheap. Who knew?

Mar 20

Congressional Republicans Introduce Proposed Budget that Increases Spending by at least 4 %; Democrats Cry that Republicans Intend to Slash Spending

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If ever there were one graph showing how broken the U.S. government is, it is the graph above. The graph shows the current proposed Republican (“Grand Old Party”) budget in comparison to the Democrats’ suggested budget for the next decade. (Thanks to Daniel Mitchell of Townhall.com.) Both continue growing government significantly, however some economists hope that the GOP plan may grow government at a rate slower than the growth of U.S. G.D.P.

Mar 19

Government Funding of Higher Education Takes Money from the Poor and Transfers it to the Rich

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Why are taxpayers made to own or pay for government colleges and universities they do not attend? The only plausible explanation is that government-owned colleges somehow meet the needs of people in ways that private colleges do not.

There is scant support for such a proposition.

In fact, governmental support for higher education has actually backfired on its intended beneficiaries (if providing higher education to the poor is the intention).

“Frequently it will actually be the better-off who succeed in having themselves subsidized by the worse-off. Consider, for example, the almost universal practice of offering a ‘free’ university education, whereby the working class, whose children rarely attend universities, pay through taxation for the education of middle-class children!” Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy: The God that Failed (2002, p. 97.))

A 2003 study showed that the most underrepresented group of Americans at the nation’s top universities is low-income Americans. Only 3% of freshmen at the top 146 most selective colleges came from the bottom quarter of U.S. households by income. Only 10% come from the bottom half (Anthony Carnevale of Educational Testing Service 2003//).

Mar 18

Believe it or Not, Welfare Spending Harms the Poor

Roger Roots, J.D., Ph.D.

Roger Roots, J.D., Ph.D.

From Roger I. Roots, “When Laws Backfire: Unintended Consequences of Public Policy,” American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 47 No. 11, July 2004, page 1382:

The unintended costs of welfare spending have rarely been compiled by academics. But research has shown that a substantial number of welfare recipients simply live in poverty by choice because of the attractiveness of welfare programs. During the mid-1980s, at least 5.7 million people—roughly one sixth of the population in poverty—were living in poverty by choice due to welfare (Goodman 1987). Each additional $1 million in welfare spending increased the poverty population by 250,000 people (Goodman 1987). Controlled experiments by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Serviced found that compared with similarly situated families not on welfare, families drawing welfare payments changed their behavior substantially.

The number of hours worked by husbands dropped 9 percent; by wives, 20 percent; by young male adults, an incredible 43 percent. The length of unemployment among husbands increased 27 percent; among wives it increased 42 percent, and for single female household heads it increased 60 percent. Divorce increased 36 percent among whites and 42 percent among blacks. (Goodman, 1987, p. 37).

Mar 18

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF PUBLIC POLICY

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In the words of the immortal Harry Browne, “Each government program carries within it the seeds of future programs that will be ‘needed’ to clean up the mess the first program creates.” (Why Government Doesn’t Work, 1995, p 17). Herbert Spencer remarked in 1850 that there was scarcely a bill introduced in the British Parliament that was not titled “An Act to Amend an Act,” the “Whereas’s” of which always heralded “on account of the miscarriage of previous legislation.” (Social Statics, 1850, p. 12).

“To mitigate distress [of the poor],” wrote Spencer, “the English people have sanctioned upward of one hundred acts in Parliament . . . each of them arising out of the failure or incompleteness of previous legislation. . . . What is the statute book but a record of such unhappy guesses?” (1850: . 11).

Mar 18

Another town eliminates police force, finds that crime drops

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The town of New Carlisle, Ohio–just outside Dayton–has eliminated its police force and cut its funding for county sheriffs deputies substantially. Just as with other towns who have done the same, crime has dropped.