Tag Archives: Socialism

News

Bobby Jindal: policies of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are the same as Greece

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Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal

Here’s an excellent editorial by Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal in left-leaning Time magazine.

He writes:

It’s simple math to understand what is happening in Greece right now. When Greece joined the euro, it benefited from the financial support of its more fiscally responsible neighbors in the euro zone. Rather than taking the opportunity to enact the structural reforms that could have increased growth — reforms that it still has not undertaken — Greece instead went on a spending spree funded by other people’s money.

Greece has been cooking the books with complicated financial instruments for years. But the problems don’t stop there. Greece’s Rubik’s Cube tax code and rampant corruption make tax evasion widespread. Golden parachute public pensions that allow public sector workers to retire as early as 45 drain dollars out of the government coffers while incentivizing a still healthy and work-age workforce to live on the public dime. It’s hard to have sufficient tax paying workers when about 75% of Greek public-sector employees retire by the age 61.

Did the new socialist government run by 40-year-old child Alex Tsipras fix anything?

They made it worse:

After taking office in January, the Alexis Tsipras administration reversed promised privatization of state-owned assets like the Port of Piraeus. In 2011, the IMF predicted Greece could bring in 50 billion euros ($56 billion) from the sale of state assets, not to mention the savings from moving those employees off the public wage and benefit system. To date, it has raised about 3 billion euros.

Business has no interest in creating jobs when crushed by government regulation. Tspiras promised to raise the minimum wage, despite the economy spiraling out of control. It’s not surprising the March unemployment rate stood at 25.6%.

Privatization is a thing that conservatives do, because we don’t like the idea that government workers get automatic pay from compulsory taxation. We prefer that whoever is providing services be in the private sector, as independent from government influence as possible. That way, they actually have to compete with other providers to earn your money – something a government monopoly never has to do.

Anyway, back to Greece socialism. Who would be stupid enough to raise taxes, raise minimum wage, increase spending and promise people more free stuff as a way of getting out of debt?

These two unqualified clowns, that’s who:

Clinton and Sanders are math deniers, like most of the Democrats in D.C. They want to grow the government economy instead of the real American economy. Rather than pursuing tax reform to improve growth or entitlement changes to reduce future expenditures, Clinton and Sanders are focused on spending trillions on Obamacare, giving free college to everyone, and raising the federal minimum wage.

Since January 2007, Democrats have added well over $10 trillion to the national debt, running it up to $18.5 trillion, higher than the entire GDP of the country. What have we got for that? Fewer people in the labor force, and more people dependent on government, that’s what. But oh, you can marry your siblings and pets now, because lurve, so that’s something.

OK, so let’s talk about Bobby Jindal. Initially, I had him slotted in as my #2 candidate with Scott Walker on top. But Walker has had two months and hasn’t done anything super conservative. Meanwhile, Jindal has offered a lot of red meat to conservatives on marriage and right to life, and now we have this aggressive condemnation of socialism, too. I think Jindal is now my top pick, and Walker is next, then Cruz. Fiorina is looking better at this point and is #4, and Rubio is off my list entirely.

News

Public schools implanting IUDs in sixth-grade girls without parent’s knowledge

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Political spending by the NEA in 2013
Political spending by the National Education Association in 2013

What does big government really look like? What does it mean for individuals, families, businesses and churches to give their money to the government so that the government can distribute it as they see fit?

Well, Seattle is one of the most liberal cities in America and they embody the idea of big government. Let’s see how they spend the massive amounts of money they extract from individuals, families, businesses and churches.

Life News reports.

Excerpt:

Earlier this month, LifeNews.com reported on a high school in Seattle, Washington that is now implanting intrauterine devices (IUD), as well as other forms of birth control and doing so without parental knowledge or permission.

The IUD is known as a long acting reversible contraception, and may even act as an abortifacient. So, a young teen in Seattle can’t get a coke at her high school, but she can have a device implanted into her uterus, which can unknowingly kill her unborn child immediately after conception. Or, if she uses another method, she can increase her chances of health risks for herself, especially if using a new method.

The high school, Chief Sealth International, a public school, began offering the devices in 2010, made possible by a Medicaid program known as Take Charge and a non-profit, Neighborcare. Students can receive the device or other method free of cost and without their parent’s insurance. And while it’s lauded that the contraception is confidential, how can it be beneficial for a parent-child relationship when the parents don’t even know the devices or medication their daughter is using?

As it turns out, Chief Sealth isn’t the only school in Seattle doing this. As CNS News reports, more schools are fitting young girls — as young as 6th grade — with the devices and doing so without their parents knowing.

Now how did this happen? Where did the public schools get the authority to have control of these children? And where did the money come from to pay for these schools?

The answer is that the money was taken from individuals, families, businesses and churches and given to the government. And how does a secular government spend this money? Do they spend it the same way that individuals, families, businesses and churches spend this money? No. They spend the money advancing their secular agenda, which, in this case, is to advance feminism and the sexual revolution. They want young girls to be available for sex, because they helps them to be less capable of life-long married love. A woman who has had a large number of break-ups, abortions, etc. at a young age is more likely to look to government, not to a husband, for support.  Undermining her father’s authority in the area of sexuality is exactly what they are trying to achieve. And the father is paying to be undermined with his tax dollars.

Commentary

Do unemployment benefits discourage people from working?

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I noticed that the latest jobs report showed that the percentage of work-eligible Americans working was at a 38-year-low.

CNS News reports:

A record 93,626,000 Americans 16 or older did not participate in the nation’s labor force in June, as the labor force participation rate dropped to 62.6 percent, a 38-year low, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In June, according to BLS, the nation’s civilian noninstitutional population, consisting of all people 16 or older who were not in the military or an institution, hit 250,663,000. Of those, 157,037,000 participated in the labor force by either holding a job or actively seeking one.

Now, let me ask you this. Does paying people to not work cause more people to not work? It seems to me that whatever you subsidize, you get more of, and whatever you tax, you get less of.

Now look at this article from the radically-leftist New York Times.

It says:

Before this recession, most economists probably thought that some amount of unemployment benefits were just and compassionate, and offered a sense of security even to people who were lucky enough to retain their jobs, despite the fact that the program would raise unemployment rates and reduce both employment and economic output.

In other words, unemployment benefits shrink the economy to some degree, but shrinking the economy a bit may be a price worth paying.

Unemployment benefits were thought to reduce employment and output because, by definition, working people were ineligible for the benefits. In particular, an unemployed person who finds and starts a new job, or returns to working at his previous job, is supposed to give up his unemployment benefits. Economists had found that a large fraction of unemployed people delay going back to work solely because the unemployment insurance program was paying them for not working.

Here’s a new study explaining how the “generosity” of the big government Democrat Party actually encourages people to avoid working, and to remain dependent on the government for their “income”.

A study published by two labor economists, Stepan Jurajda and Frederick J. Tannery, looked at employment histories for unemployment insurance recipients in Pittsburgh in the early 1980s. Unemployment rates got quite high in Pittsburgh in those days, reaching 16 percent at one point, and staying over 10 percent for two and a half years.

The chart below summarizes their findings for Pittsburgh.

The chart displays the fraction of persons (in Pittsburgh) receiving unemployment benefits who began working again, as a function of the number of weeks until their unemployment benefits were scheduled to be exhausted. For example, a “hazard” value of “0.04″ for week “-14″ means that, among unemployed persons with 14 weeks remaining until their benefit exhaustion date, 4 percent of them either began working a new job or returned to their previous job.

The chart:

Unemployment offers a disincentive to find work
Unemployment benefits offer a disincentive for Americans to find work

The most troubling thing about this is what is not said in the chart or the study – think about the children growing up in these households where their parents, especially the fathers, are not working. What are they learning about self-sufficiency and the role of government? They are the ones who we are going to task with paying for our lavish entitlement programs in the future. Are people who think that dependency on government is normal being trained to pay for the exploding costs of Social Security and Medicare?