Tag Archives: Government Spending

John Hawkins of Right Wing News interviews Tom Sowell

Thomas Sowell

Right Wing News has a great interview with my favorite economist, Tom Sowell.

Excerpt:

Paul Krugman is one of the best known and highest regarded economists on the Left. He says the problem we have right now is the government simply is not spending enough money and the fears we have about the debt causing all these major problems are extremely overblown. What do you say to that argument that is very prevalent on the Left?

Well, it’s a heads I win, tails you lose argument because if we spend twice as much for the next ten years and things don’t get any better – you can still say, “We didn’t spend enough.” We should have spent four times as much. And if we spend four times as much, you can say we should spend 10 times as much. It’s an impossible argument to refute.

It just so happens I’ve been reading a statement by Henry Morganfeld, the Secretary of Treasury under FDR, and he made the statement in 1939 — he said, “We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.” Now this is FDR’s closest confidant, the man who has been in charge of the spending — and after six years of it at this point, they have nothing to show for it and in point of fact, unemployment had gotten back up above 20 percent about a month before he made the statement.

Look at this – the man is branching out from fiscal conservatism into social conservatism. He’s not a Christian, so this is pretty awesome.

Excerpt:

Now, you talked a lot about cultural issues in the book. That’s something you’ve gotten more into in your columns lately. In the book you wrote about gay marriage and the comparison between gay marriage and interracial marriage. Why do you think that’s a bad comparison and what do you say to the argument that gay Americans have a right, perhaps even a constitutional right to get married?

Well, my Constitution must be out of date because I haven’t seen it there. It’s one of many things, such as the separation of church and state, that I’ve never seen there.

Marriage is not a right. Marriage is an imposition of a government’s interest in certain unions. Probably because those unions produce children, but for other reasons, too. Otherwise people could marry or not marry utterly independently of the government.

But what we’re talking about is not gay marriage. We’re talking about redefining marriage through the convenience of leaders who speak for the gays. And I don’t see any more reason for doing that than for allowing bigamists to redefine marriage to suit their convenience.

And you can read Tom Sowell’s latest column on FDR and the Great Depression here. He talks about how the policies of President Roosevely failed to lower unemployment and how they mirror the policies of Obama and the Democrats today.

Public school teachers in Buffalo spent 9 million on cosmetic surgery in 2009

Fox New York reports that public school teachers spent 9 million dollars on cosmetic surgery in 2009. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

The state-appointed authority overseeing Buffalo public school finances says taxpayer-covered cosmetic surgery rung up by the city’s teachers totaled nearly $9 million in 2009.

The Buffalo Fiscal Stability Authority reports that last year’s costs for such elective procedures as chemical peels and other skin treatments are up $8 million over the 2004 tab for cosmetic surgery provided under the teachers’ union contract.

School district officials say teachers or their dependents accounted for 90 percent of the approximately 500 people who received cosmetic surgery last year. About 10,000 district employees are eligible for the benefit.

If we make the public schools compete with private schools, charter schools, and homeschooling parents, then the ones that waste money like this would go out of business. So long as they have a direct feed of money from the government, they really don’t have to care what children and parents want. The only way to make them care is by making them compete for parents’ money.

Canada waking up to the threat of Islamic terrorism

Political Map of Canada

Check out this column from the Ottawa Citizen. (H/T The Binks)

Excerpt:

This is your future. That was my wretched thought on behalf of Canadians as I watched Thursday’s Project Samossa news conference.

Samossa was the major national security investigation that erupted this week in counterterrorism raids and the arrest of four Muslim-Canadians. The government’s charges against three of them imply a wealth of evidence that will shock the conscience of Canadians.

These charges and limited revelations suggest that we could be front-row witnesses to the most vile of manifestations of the Islamist jihad in this country. The allegation is that people living among us and enjoying the immense privileges of Canadian citizenship, are siding with enemy forces aiming to kill and maim our boys and girls serving in Afghanistan — and maybe residents of Ottawa and other Canadian centres, too.

[…]To understand this in the context of Islamic radicalism is to account properly for the main sources of Canada’s escalating extremism. These sources are immigration and refugee influxes, and the homegrown extremist phenomenon.

Liberal politicians long ago turned immigration and refugee streams into vote-importing mechanisms. Conservatives continue to do so at the expense of Canadians’ safety and tens of billions in net per annum immigration costs, plus attendant and overwhelming security costs. So pronounced is the pathology that not even a terrible recession could prevent Immigration Minister Jason Kenney from hiking immigration and refugee levels from what were already roughly the highest per capita in the world. These levels are too great to allow for reliable vetting in a world where war and ideological struggles rage, and we are a target.

The cause of all of these problems is the left-wing political parties (Liberals, NDP and Bloc Quebecois). These left-wing parties hope to import “refugees” and unskilled immigrants and give them the right to vote as full citizens, thus ensuring a fresh supply of votes for socialism.

Consider this recent article from Ezra Levant showing 71% of Tamil “refugees” from Sri Lanka return to Sri Lanka for vacations. Muslims  immigrate to Canada and then claim welfare for up to four of their wives. Liberal MP Ruby Dhalla is attempting to buy votes by reducing the residency requirement from 10 years to 3 years for Old Age Security OR Guaranteed Income Supplement money. That means that an immigrant can bring a non-working relative aged 62 into Canada and then let them stay there for 3 years and then they will be eligible for a full pension funded by other working Canadians.