This is quite worth watching, and the thing is that I imagine there will be many similar excerpts from The Daily Bolt that will be worth watching day after day right through to the election. Not being among those who take pleasure in seeing the Libs crash and burn with Malcolm at the helm, this editorial comment on Turnbull v Abbott fills me with great foreboding. But for a change, there is the kind of feedback being run at those narrow-cast Members of Parliament who took their lead from the ABC while ignoring the people who actually wished to see the Coalition succeed. I fear there will be a good deal of repenting in leisure among the 54.
Let me start with the opening quote, which is as sound today as when first stated at least 150 years ago. It’s from Abraham Lincoln:
“No country can sustain, in idleness, more than a small percentage of its numbers. The great majority must labor at something productive.”
I specially liked that he emphasised the need for the labour to be productive, i.e. value adding. Digging holes and then filling them in again may require effort, and might even seem like work, but it is not productive and therefore should be neither paid nor encouraged. Lincoln had probably read J.S. Mill, something no one any longer does. The article, though, is not really about this, but about getting people off welfare by insisting they not just go to work but do something productive.
According to a report from the Foundation for Government Accountability, before Kansas instituted a work requirement, 93 percent of food stamp recipients were in poverty, with 84 percent in severe poverty. Few of the food stamp recipients claimed any income. Only 21 percent were working at all, and two-fifths of those working were working fewer than 20 hours per week.
Once work requirements were established, thousands of food stamp recipients moved into the workforce, promoting income gains and a decrease in poverty. Forty percent of the individuals who left the food stamp ranks found employment within three months, and about 60 percent found employment within a year. They saw an average income increase of 127 percent. Half of those who left the rolls and are working have earnings above the poverty level. Even many of those who stayed on food stamps saw their income increase significantly.
The dignity of work is more than a cliche put around by those who pay taxes to fund the idleness of others.
I find the absence of focus on the US primary results even in the United States quite creepy, although what do I know about what’s newsy? Up until now, there would be quite a story across the page about Trump wins. Near as I can see, there is practically nothing at all. You would almost think there was a wish across the media to take the momentum out of Trump’s astonishing wins, to pull the wind from his sails.
It reminds me how The Australian decided that Turnbull should replace Abbott and from then on that was how the news and comment was bent. It has now been decided that the United States needs its own Malcolm Turnbull and Justin Trudeau, and that is how the news is being bent. Anyway, this is the best I could do, from USA Today:
Donald Trump went five-for-five in sweeping a set of northeastern primaries Tuesday and declared himself the “presumptive” Republican nominee for president in the face of allied opposition from rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich.
“As far as I’m concerned, it’s over,” Trump said in claiming easy victories in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware. He said, “this is a far bigger win than we even expected — all five.”
Citing a large number of delegates and votes in the face of Republican establishment opposition, the maverick businessman said “the best way to beat the system” is to have evenings like this.
Cruz and Kasich, who have formed a loose alliance to try to block Trump in some future contests, are hoping to pick up some delegates after Tuesday’s primaries, but their totals will likely be minimal in the wake of Trump’s landslide wins.
Somebody is voting for him but it’s apparently no longer big news.
A major question that will confront us all on July 2 will be whether to vote for the party led by Malcolm Turnbull. James Allan and I really have had an exchange of letters over this issue that have now been published at Quadrant Online. It goes without saying that no one will vote for Malcolm Turnbull. The question is should one vote against Labor. That is, which of Malcolm with the 43 plus the Nationals or Bill Shorten and the Labor Party with Tanya and the rest is less worse than the other. This is how Jim starts his letter to me:
I have one question for you. If you see all decisions as snapshots – one-off calls between two choices on the current table – then here’s what follows. Presumably you will always opt for the least bad choice (and I grant you that Turnbull is less bad than Shorten for us small government, right-of-centre types), without an eye to longer-term consequences. But my query is, what’s wrong with a longer view?
This is how I begin my reply:
Let me begin with a story I have told before, which I wrote about just before the spill that replaced Tony Abbott with Malcolm Turnbull:
When I used to work in Canberra, our offices backed onto the Liberal Party headquarters, and I was asked one time, even before Malcolm entered Parliament, what I thought about him. My answer was that if I was in the constituency that would decide the fate of the next election, and my vote was the one that would put him in or out, that I would hesitate about which way to go. That was then. Today I would have no doubt.
Since the post was titled, “I would never vote for a Coalition led by Malcolm Turnbull” you can see which way I would have gone. You can find the whole thing at the Catallaxy blog via the link above, so I do have some history in thinking about these issues:
But that was then.
There are no good answers, but you can read his and mine at the link.
I’ve already dealt with this delusional comment from Obama here but I come back to it because it is so repulsive and also because it has been raised in a different way by Tom Blumer, Obama Takes Credit For ‘Saving the World Economy From a Great Depression’. This is Obama laying down his legacy, his trail of achievements that the mendacious press and academic enablers can go on about in the future. You have to therefore fortify yourself against the legacy-intentions of this fantastically incompetent narcissistic buffoon who has ruined everything he has touched:
After setting up the conditions in February 2009 for an extended recession and historically weak recovery in the U.S., the idea Obama went to Europe two months later in April and then began “saving the world” is a sick joke only gullible, economics-ignorant reporters and leftists could possibly believe. Sadly, they’re the ones who still primarily control the news and other key institutions, so we’ll probably be hearing this crap for years on end — just like we’ve had to put up with the fiction that Franklin Delano Roosevelt saved the country from the Great Depression in the 1930s. The truth is that he lengthened it by seven years.
And the seven years are only if we stop today. The Japanese “lost decade”, built out of the same policies, has continued for more than twenty years and shows no evidence of coming to an end any time soon. Obama’s taking credit for the achievements of others was also noted by Victor Davis Hanson in 2014:
Listen to the president and one would think that he was in office during the financial crisis that began on September 15, 2008. For the nth time, Obama reminded the nation on 60 Minutes of the financial meltdown he inherited. That is his usual way of suggesting to the American people that they could hardly hope for normal times after six years of his own governance. In truth, Obama entered office on January 20, 2009 — over four months after the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that precipitated a general financial meltdown.
One would not expect Obama to fault past liberal congressional intervention in the financial sector that in large part forced the issuance of subprime risky mortgages, much less the earlier deregulation of the financial industry under Bill Clinton that helped fueled the rampant speculation. The videos of the sad congressional banter about supposedly insensitive questioning of the duplicitous and corrupt Fannie head Franklin Raines, or the self-important bluster of former Rep. Barney Frank, make a good 10-minute tutorial on the meltdown — namely how Wall Street sharks, hand-in-glove with liberal congressional operatives and Clinton appointees, offered federally “guaranteed” mortgages to those who had no ability to pay them back, fueling a phony real estate boom and overvalued stock market.
Obama might at least admit that when he entered office the panic had largely passed. The tools needed to deal with it that he embraced had months earlier been implemented by someone else. Indeed, Obama was president for just a few months before the recession that began in December 2007 ended in June 2009 — well before the effect of any of the policies, good or bad, could have taken effect.
Our current economic mess — the worst post-recession recovery since World War II, more people out of work than when Obama took office, a steady decline in real family income, massive new debt — is largely a result of his own policies of five consecutive $1 trillion deficits, the Obamacare catastrophe, new burdensome and capricious regulations, near-zero interest rates, and the anti-business psychological climate brought on by constant hectoring of the “you did not build that” and “at a certain point you’ve made enough money” sort.
The thing about the lying, however, is that we have no corrective for policies that don’t work since the common view promoted across the media and by economists is that the stimulus has actually had a beneficial effect. So why not keep on keeping on? How big a crash does there have to be before we abandon the idea that government spending can lead us into recovery?
There are many mysteries in the universe, but in the social universe this is one of the biggest. Two separate stories but with a common cause. The first, How the state of the economy is literally killing people. This is about the United States.
Suicide rates are soaring, according to federal data released last week. Especially in economically depressed states and job-starved upstate New York. People in need of work are twice as likely to take their own lives as employed people, and people fired in their 40s and 50s find it hardest to get hired again.
That makes boosting economic growth a life-or-death issue for many. But you wouldn’t know it listening to President Obama and Hillary Clinton. President Obama whitewashes reality, claiming the “American economy is pretty darn good right now.”
False. The Obama economy is stalled. It grew at a measly .7 percent annualized rate the first quarter of this year. That’s compared with the 3.5 percent rate the US enjoyed for most of the 20th century — what’s needed to sustain employment and optimism.
Fridges zapped off in kitchens across Venezuela as the government turned off the electricity supply to help ease a power shortage that is worsening the country’s economic crisis.
It is the latest drastic measure by the government in a crisis that already has Venezuelans queuing for hours to buy scarce supplies in shops.
The government imposed a four-hour blackout in eight states starting Monday and said the measure will last 40 days. The states of Caracas and Vargas had also been on the list for blackouts but were spared at the last minute. . . .
President Nicolas Maduro blames the collapse on an “economic war” by capitalists.
They don’t go into the potential death toll since the odd part is that you would get the impression from the journalist that he agrees with Maduro about the causes of the blackouts. The most educated are often the most stupid – see the next Bernie Sanders rally for confirmation.
It’s been a long, long time since I left but nothing much seems to have changed. I even used to have a shirt like that. The hat is a “touque” and has the emblem of the Montreal Canadiens (note the spelling). My team was the Toronto Maple Leafs (not Leaves!) who were voted the worst sports franchise in North America and I think they are about to retire the trophy and give it to them permanently. And among the things that are so unusual is that when I left Trudeau was Prime Minister and when I last looked, Trudeau was still Prime Minister. It’s like Cuba with Castro.
On the other hand, moving to a Trudeau-led Canada might mean things will be just like the Obama years:
Trudeau’s public performances in the physical and intellectual domains, as well as his documented appeal to female effusiveness, is a vivid expression of his followers’ utter lack of political sobriety, intellectual acumen and emotional maturity. That a country could give its support and a 66 per cent approval rating to a preening charlatan boggles the mind and beggars the imagination—or would, if Americans had not done the same with a smooth-talking ignoramus like Barack Obama, who thinks the U.S. consists of 57 states and that Austrians speak Austrian.
Canada has gone the way of the U.S. If it were not already obvious, it would take at least the eight limbs of Samadhi yogic meditation and petabytes of quantum computing to calculate the likelihood of such prodigious imbecility coming to pass, both in the leadership and the electorate, who appear to deserve one another. It makes me ashamed to be Canadian.
For Americans who are proud of having elected the most incompetent fool as their president, things will be able to continue as they have for the previous eight years.
During a telephone interview with “Fox & Friends,” Trump was asked about a tweet from Lena Dunham on Monday in which she vowed to leave the U.S. for Vancouver if he is elected.
Trump’s response: “Well, she’s a B-actor. You know, she has no — you know, no mojo.”
“I heard Whoopi Goldberg too. That would be a great thing for our country,” Trump said, as the show flashed a graphic of celebrities who it said would leave the U.S. for Canada, including Dunham, Jon Stewart and Rosie O’Donnell, with whom the Manhattan real estate mogul has feuded for years.
When co-host Steve Doocy pointed out O’Donnell’s name on the list, Trump remarked, “Now I have to get elected.”
“Now I have to get elected because I’ll be doing a great service to our country,” he said. “Now it’s much more important. In fact, I’ll immediately get off this call and start campaigning right now.”
I never spoke about my financial travails, not even with my closest friends—that is, until I came to the realization that what was happening to me was also happening to millions of other Americans, and not just the poorest among us, who, by definition, struggle to make ends meet. It was, according to that Fed survey and other surveys, happening to middle-class professionals and even to those in the upper class. It was happening to the soon-to-retire as well as the soon-to-begin. It was happening to college grads as well as high-school dropouts. It was happening all across the country, including places where you might least expect to see such problems.
It’s not a money-tree you need but a production flow. Wealth is based on real saving and real investment and its dividend is the output of goods and services produced. But it will only work if the economic system is directed by entrepreneurs, with governments as far a way as possible doing only what is required to keep the machine running in good order. Ultimately, living standards fall because there is no structure in place to keep them up.
It’s the same here. Watching Malcolm in action – with the NBN a perfect example of economic illiteracy and ignorance, leaves me unable to identify what is required to make someone like him understand what is actually required to create prosperity and growth.
Law of Markets 