Tag Archives: Recession

Commentary

Michele Bachmann: hot photos from her vacation on the beach

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Rep. Michele Bachmann

Before we see the hot pictures of Michele Bachmann from her vacation on the beach, let’s take a look at this Wall Street Journal article and find out what sorts of economics books Michele Bachmann reads on the hot beach possibly in her bathing suit.

Ms. Bachmann is best known for her conservative activism on issues like abortion, but what I want to talk about today is economics. When I ask who she reads on the subject, she responds that she admires the late Milton Friedman as well as Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. “I’m also an Art Laffer fiend—we’re very close,” she adds. “And [Ludwig] von Mises. I love von Mises,” getting excited and rattling off some of his classics like “Human Action” and “Bureaucracy.” “When I go on vacation and I lay on the beach, I bring von Mises.”

Consider Thomas Sowell’s “The Housing Boom and Bust”. Here’s a photo of that book which Michele Bachmann reads on the hot beach possibly in a swimsuit:

Picture of book Michele Bachmann reads on the hot beach
Picture of a book Michele Bachmann reads on the hot beach

The Wall Street Journal explains more:

As we rush from her first-floor digs in the Cannon House Office Building to the House floor so she can vote, I ask for her explanation of the 2008 financial meltdown. “There were a lot of bad actors involved, but it started with the Community Reinvestment Act under Jimmy Carter and then the enhanced amendments that Bill Clinton made to force, in effect, banks to make loans to people who lacked creditworthiness. If you want to come down to a bottom line of ‘How did we get in the mess?’ I think it was a reduction in standards.”

She continues: “Nobody wanted to say, ‘No.’ The implicit and then the explicit guarantees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were sopping up the losses. Being on the Financial Services Committee, I can assure you, all roads lead to Freddie and Fannie.”

Consider Walter Williams’ “Liberty vs the Tyranny of Socialism”. Here’s a picture of that book which Michelle Bachman reads on the hot beach possibly in a bathing suit:

Photo of a book Michelle Bachman reads on the hot beach
Photo of a book Michelle Bachman reads on the hot beach

The Wall Street Journal explains more:

Ms. Bachmann voted against the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) “both times,” she boasts, and she has no regrets since Congress “just gave the Treasury a $700 billion blank check.” She complains that no one bothered to ask about the constitutionality of these extraordinary interventions into the financial markets. “During a recent hearing I asked Secretary [Timothy] Geithner three times where the constitution authorized the Treasury’s actions, and his response was, ‘Well, Congress passed the law.'”

Insufficient focus on constitutional limits to federal power is a Bachmann pet peeve. “It’s like when you come up to a stop sign and you’re driving. Some people have it in their mind that the stop sign is optional. The Constitution is government’s stop sign. It says, you—the three branches of government—can go so far and no farther. With TARP, the government blew through the Constitutional stop sign and decided ‘Whatever it takes, that’s what we’re going to do.'”

Does this mean she would have favored allowing the banks to fail? “I would have. People think when you have a, quote, ‘bank failure,’ that that is the end of the bank. And it isn’t necessarily. A normal way that the American free market system has worked is that we have a process of unwinding. It’s called bankruptcy. It doesn’t mean, necessarily, that the industry is eclipsed or that it’s gone. Often times, the phoenix rises out of the ashes.”

Consider Milton Friedman’s “Capitalism and Freedom”. Here’s a pic of that book which Michelle Bauchman reads on the hot beach possibly in a bikini:

Pics of a book Michelle Bockman reads on the hot beach
Pics of a book Michelle Bauchman reads on the hot beach

The Wall Street Journal explains more:

“For one, I believe my policies prior to ’08 would have been much different from [President Bush’s]. I wouldn’t have spent so much money,” she says, pointing in particular at the Department of Education and the Medicare prescription drug bill. “I would have advocated for greater reductions in the corporate tax rate and reductions in the capital gains rate—even more so than what the president did.” Mr. Bush cut the capital gains rate to 15% from 20% in 2003.

She’s also no fan of the Federal Reserve’s decade-long policy of flooding the U.S. economy with cheap money. “I love a lowered interest rate like anyone else. But clearly the Fed has had competing goals and objectives. One is the soundness of money and then the other is jobs. The two different objectives are hard to reconcile. What has gotten us into deep trouble and has people so perturbed is the debasing of the currency.”

That’s why, if she were president, she wouldn’t renominate Ben Bernanke as Fed chairman: “I think that it’s very important to demonstrate to the American people that the Federal Reserve will have a new sheriff” to keep the dollar strong and stable.

[…]Ms. Bachmann attributes many of her views, especially on economics, to her middle-class upbringing in 1960s Iowa and Minnesota. She talks with almost religious fervor about the virtues of living frugally, working hard and long hours, and avoiding debt. When she was growing up, she recalls admiringly, Iowa dairy farmers worked from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Her political opponents on the left portray her as a “she-devil,” in her words, a caricature at odds with her life accomplishments. She’s a mother of five, and she and her husband helped raise 23 teenage foster children in their home, as many as four at a time. They succeeded in getting all 23 through high school and later founded a charter school.

Michele Bachman is actually willing to pass a lower corporate tax rate than even Tim Pawlenty’s 15% rate:

If she were to take her shot, she’d run on an economic package reminiscent of Jack Kemp, the late congressman who championed supply-side economics and was the GOP vice presidential nominee in 1996. “In my perfect world,” she explains, “we’d take the 35% corporate tax rate down to nine so that we’re the most competitive in the industrialized world. Zero out capital gains. Zero out the alternative minimum tax. Zero out the death tax.”

The 3.8 million-word U.S. tax code may be irreparable, she says, a view she’s held since working as a tax attorney at the IRS 20 years ago. “I love the FAIR tax. If we were starting over from scratch, I would favor a national sales tax.” But she’s not a sponsor of the FAIR tax bill because she fears that enacting it won’t end the income tax, and “we would end up with a dual tax, a national sales tax and an income tax.”

Her main goal is to get tax rates down with a broad-based income tax that everyone pays and that “gets rid of all the deductions.” A system in which 47% of Americans don’t pay any tax is ruinous for a democracy, she says, “because there is no tie to the government benefits that people demand. I think everyone should have to pay something.”

On the stump she emphasizes an “America-centered energy policy” based on “drilling and mining for our rich resources here.” And she believes that repealing ObamaCare is a precondition to restoring a prosperous economy.

[…]Ms. Bachmann also voted for the Republican Study Committee budget that cuts deeper and faster than even Mr. Ryan would. “We do have an obligation with Social Security and Medicare, and we have to recognize that” for those who are already retired, she says. But after that, it’s Katy bar the door: “Everything else is expendable to bring spending down,” and she’d ax “whole departments” including the Department of Education.

Below are some links to learn more about Michele.

Campaign speeches, interviews and debates

Speeches:

Reactions from her recent debate performance:

Profiles of Michele Bachmann:

And here are some of her media interviews and speeches in the House of Representatives.

You can contribute to her campaign right here. You can be her friend on Facebook here and also here.

This post was linked by:

And tweeted by Kathleen McKinley and Robert Stacy McCain.

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News

Men are the biggest losers in the recession

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From the American Spectator.

Excerpt:

Over the past decade, the total number of jobs for women went up by close to a million. Meanwhile, men lost more than 3 million jobs. From 1960 to 2008, the average unemployment rate for men 25 years and older was 4.2 percent. In the last two years, it has more than doubled, shooting up to 8.9 percent. By contrast, unemployment for women of the same age and for the same period of time went from 4.7 percent to 7.2 percent, an increase of 52 percent. The disparity is more striking if one considers that women’s rate of participation in the workforce has risen sharply since 1960 while the percentage of men in the job market has been shrinking.

One reason that men’s employment rate lags behind is that there has been negative growth in the types of jobs men historically have occupied. In the last 10 years, 5.5 million manufacturing jobs were lost. That’s one-third of our manufacturing base in an industry where men make up 70 percent of the workforce. In construction, where 87 percent of positions are filled by men, more than 1.4 million jobs went away during that time frame. Approximately 4.4 million jobs have been added in the education and health care sectors, but women dominate this growing field as they make up 77 percent of the work force.

It’s working-class men, not those who occupy elite positions in finance and government, who are suffering. The hemorrhaging of manufacturing and other well-paying jobs in America means that a rising number of young American men face dwindling prospects for earning a middle-class wage in the future. Young male unemployment is at 19 percent. More than 15 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans (most of whom are male) were unemployed in January 2011. African-American males also have been hit hard. Ten years ago, both African-American men and women had the same unemployment rate of 8.2 percent. Since then, the men’s rate has more than doubled and now is almost four points higher than the unemployment rate for women. Similarly, Hispanic men now have a 1.7 percent higher unemployment rate than Hispanic women, whom they historically have outperformed.

With growing numbers of out-of-work young men comes a volatile mix of negative social outcomes: they are less likely to marry, less likely to be a stable parental force for the children they father, and more likely to engage in violent behavior.

One would think that Washington policymakers would see these developments as a cause for concern. Nonetheless, for more than a decade, they have looked the other way as good American jobs have been shipped overseas, outsourced or have simply gone away. Ironically, our business tax system incentivizes our companies to export jobs and prosperity overseas. Also, our government welfare system all but discourages an intact family of a father and mother by the way it distributes money.

Men are not going to be able to fulfill their roles of protector, provider and moral/spiritual leader if they do not have the authority that comes from being the principle/sole breadwinner in the family. Right now, we have a situation where the schools are discriminating against men by having a tiny minority of male teachers, as well as co-ed classrooms. Men cannot learn as well when they are taught primarily by women and are distracted by female peers and do not have a separate male-focused curriculum. And that is why men now earn 40% of bachelor degrees on many campuses. Government’s massive spending and job-killing policies leave the few men who can graduate in an unstable employment situation where marriage becomes too risky. De-valuing a man’s savings with inflation doesn’t help, either.

Commentary

Carrie Lukas does the math on the male-female pay gap

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Carrie Lukas
Carrie Lukas

A popular article by Carrie Lukas, writing in the Wall Street Journal. (H/T Mary)

Excerpt:

The unemployment rate is consistently higher among men than among women. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 9.3% of men over the age of 16 are currently out of work. The figure for women is 8.3%. Unemployment fell for both sexes over the past year, but labor force participation (the percentage of working age people employed) also dropped. The participation rate fell more among men (to 70.4% today from 71.4% in March 2010) than women (to 58.3% from 58.8%). That means much of the improvement in unemployment numbers comes from discouraged workers—particularly male ones—giving up their job searches entirely.

Men have been hit harder by this recession because they tend to work in fields like construction, manufacturing and trucking, which are disproportionately affected by bad economic conditions. Women cluster in more insulated occupations, such as teaching, health care and service industries.

[…]The Department of Labor’s Time Use survey shows that full-time working women spend an average of 8.01 hours per day on the job, compared to 8.75 hours for full-time working men. One would expect that someone who works 9% more would also earn more. This one fact alone accounts for more than a third of the wage gap.

Choice of occupation also plays an important role in earnings. While feminists suggest that women are coerced into lower-paying job sectors, most women know that something else is often at work. Women gravitate toward jobs with fewer risks, more comfortable conditions, regular hours, more personal fulfillment and greater flexibility. Simply put, many women—not all, but enough to have a big impact on the statistics—are willing to trade higher pay for other desirable job characteristics.

Men, by contrast, often take on jobs that involve physical labor, outdoor work, overnight shifts and dangerous conditions (which is also why men suffer the overwhelming majority of injuries and deaths at the workplace). They put up with these unpleasant factors so that they can earn more.

Recent studies have shown that the wage gap shrinks—or even reverses—when relevant factors are taken into account and comparisons are made between men and women in similar circumstances. In a 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30, the research firm Reach Advisors found that women earned an average of 8% more than their male counterparts. Given that women are outpacing men in educational attainment, and that our economy is increasingly geared toward knowledge-based jobs, it makes sense that women’s earnings are going up compared to men’s.

My favorite book on feminism, economics and marriage is Carrie Lukas’ “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex and Feminism“. If you don’t have the book, then please go out and buy one for you, and one for a young, unmarried woman in your life. Books like this one are for women who are serious about making their marriages last. And men can read them, too – so that we’ll know what to look for in women. There is nothing more attractive to a marriage-minded man than a fiscally conservative woman.

Here’s an interview of Carrie Lukas conducted by famous men’s rights activist Bernard Chapin. The next time you see men reading the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, take a closer look. On the inside of that magazine we are often concealing a copy of Carrie Lukas’ book. When Carrie Lukas talks about economics and policy, men think about marriage.