“California will run out of cash by early March if the state does not take swift action to find $3.3 billion through payment delays and borrowing, according to a letter state Controller John Chiang sent to state lawmakers today.”
Remember this the next time some liberal says that Texas has a budget crises “just like California.” We don’t. The Texas budget battle was like a husband and wife arguing over what to cut back from the household budget to keep putting money in the kids’ college fund. California’s budget crises is like two junkies arguing over whether to sell the baby’s insulin to buy more crack. Texas has never had to worry about whether the lights will stay on or whether the checks the state government writes will bounce or not. Nor will it, as long as the fiscal discipline that comes from having conservative Republicans in charge of the House, Senate and the Governor’s Mansion remains in effect.
The big government, high tax, closed-shop, heavily regulated blue model doesn’t work any more, and whenever you hear that Texas should embrace the California model, what they’re really saying is that big government is so awesome its worth the long-term risk of default and bankruptcy to implement. It isn’t, and it’s not.
You know the problem with doing one of these roundups on the European Debt Crises? I can search for “Euro” just about anytime of the day and night on Google News and come up with a dozen things I could potentially include. So just consider this a Whitman’s European Despair Sampler of possible bad news, as there’s a lot more where this came from:
European Finance Minsters on Greece’s latest bond offer: REJECTED.
In exchange for bailing out Greece yet again, Germany wants Greece to cede control over its tax rates and budget to an EU commission (i.e., Germany). It’s almost touching, this German naivety that Greeks can actually be compelled to obey German laws when they can’t even be compelled to obey Greek laws even now. But despite the fact that such government dictates would be ignored just like they are now, Greeks are still furious at the proposal. (Hat tip: Ace.)
And if Berlin doesn’t get to call the tune? “Germany and the Netherlands are likely to quit the eurozone rather than swallow an indefinite number of ‘unrequited transfers’ to the union’s crisis-stricken nations.”
What will European currency look like after a Euro-zone breakup? Like this.
Another month, another EuroZone bailout fund. The rules for the New and Improved Euro Bailout Fund is: 1. “Access [will] be made conditional on signing a new treaty on fiscal discipline.” 2. “Countries representing 85 percent of the fund’s capital [will make] decisions instead of unanimity among the eurozone 17 – will only apply to authorise ESM loans from existing funds.” So 1.) We get an entire new set of fiscal discipline guidelines for the PIIGs governments to ignore, and 2. Germany will call the tune, and the rest of the Eurozone will dance. At least until the next shuffling of the fiscal deck chairs.
Well, here’s a headline sure to fill investors with confidence: “From now on, in Europe, everything gets worse.”
Spanish unemployment hits 23.4%. And what happens when austerity means they can no longer pay people not to work? That’s he problem with cradle-to-grave European welfare state: sooner or later you run out of your grandchildren’s money…
The Soviet Union yesterday: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” Greece today: “The old dynamic—with Greece pretending to make structural changes and its lenders pretending to save it from default—has become untenable.”
The whole EU illusion has been predicated on the assumption that Greeks can be made to behave like Germans, and that the EU could manage to forge a new, multi-ethnic, post-national identity in 20 years when Belgium hasn’t been able to do it in almost 200.
Cameron caves. Sadly, this behavior is far more in line with his previous record than his brief stint of standing on principle.
House Republicans are working to rescind the $100 billion IMF bailout fund Nancy Pelosi helped create. They may not succeed, but they might force the Obama Administration to defend backstopping the Euro at a time when the federal budget is still hemorrhaging red ink…
Last week: France’s credit rating makes our latest Euro bailout fund rock solid. This week: oops.
The threat of default is also holding up the merger of two Greek banks, maybe because it’s as yet unclear just how they’ll put European taxpayers on the hook for their losses. Once that’s figured out, I’m sure the merger will fly through…
Those bondholders who can’t stick it to taxpayers are looking at 70% losses for Greek debt.
France’s credit rating, that is. “Standard & Poor’s has downgraded France’s credit rating, French TV reported Friday, while several euro zone countries face the same fate later in the day, according to reports.” Maybe because that “strict” 2012 budget France passed still had a budget deficit of 4.5% of GDP, despite the EU having a “limit” (in much the same way the Professional Wrestling has a “limit” on fouls) of 3.0%.
The race to a Euro-crackup seems to have slowed down to merely a jaunty saunter this week. Maybe once everyone made it to the New Year without a sovereign default, the Eurocrats might have breathed a sigh, confident that there’s still a few miles yet before they went over the falls…
Germany could create a parallel currency—a new D-Mark, pegged at 1.0 to the euro. The German government would guarantee that holders of German government bonds could convert euro securities to new-D-mark instruments on a one-to-one basis up to some designated date, perhaps two years in the future. Private German contracts expressed in euros would switch to new-D-mark claims over the same period. The transition would likely feature a period in which the euro and new D-mark circulate as parallel currencies.
Other countries could follow a path toward reintroduction of their own currencies over a two-year period. For example, Italy could have a new lira at 1.0 to the euro. If all the euro-zone countries followed this course, the vanishing of the euro currency in 2014 would come to resemble the disappearance of the 11 separate European moneys in 2001.
Of course, this would mean that any bonds from the PIIGS with a maturity date more than two years in the future would trade at a heavy discount, but that’s far preferable to the looming Euro crash. But a bigger problem to this proposal actually being implemented is that it reverses the drive to centralize European bureaucracy, and Eurocrats will never stand for that.
Like a squirrel hording nuts for winter, I’ve set aside a few tasty links for you to chew on:
George Will offers up a masterful column on why big government actually increases, rather than decreases, inequality.
Liberals have a rendezvous with regret. Their largest achievement is today’s redistributionist government. But such government is inherently regressive: It tends to distribute power and money to the strong, including itself.
Government becomes big by having big ambitions for supplanting markets as society’s primary allocator of wealth and opportunity. Therefore it becomes a magnet for factions muscular enough, in money or numbers or both, to bend government to their advantage.
[snip]
Not only does redistributionist government direct wealth upward; in asserting a right to do so, it siphons power into itself. A puzzling aspect of our politically contentious era is how little contention there is about the ethics of coercive redistribution by progressive taxation and other government “corrections” of social outcomes it considers unethical or unaesthetic.
This reticence, in an age in which political reticence is rare, reflects the difficulty of articulating principled defenses of these practices. They go undefended because they are generally popular with a public that misunderstands their net effects and because the practices are the political class’s vocation today. The big winners from these practices are that class and the interests adept at collaborating with it.
Government uses redistribution to correct social outcomes that offend it. But government rarely explains, or perhaps even recognizes, the reasoning by which it decides why particular outcomes of consensual market activities are incorrect. When taxes are levied not to efficiently fund government but to impose this or that notion of distributive justice, remember: Taxes are always coerced contributions to government, which is always the first, and often the principal, beneficiary of them.
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindel makes the case for Rick Perry:
Mark Styen on the left’s idea of empathy: “In 2008, the Left gleefully mocked Sarah Palin’s live baby. It was only a matter of time before they moved on to a dead one.”
Speaking of Steyn, here are his wishes for a Happy New Year in his usual gloomy, depressing, acerbic way.
And speaking still further of Steyn, he once noted that China will get old before it gets rich. And just what is it like to be old in China now? It really sucks. It turns out Communism’s claims of taking better care of the helpless was just as big a lie as all communism’s other claims…
Since that piece came out December 19, it’s hardly cutting edge news. But I’ve been ruminating on it for a while to try and figure out if I have anything more to add. I think I do. And with the Iowa Caucuses looming, I probably should.
I haven’t covered much of the 2012 Presidential race, mainly because I’ve been focusing on the Texas Senate Race and everyone and their dog was blogging every twist in the POTUSA race.
OMG! Ron Paul is up 3 points!
Plus I don’t have cable, so I wouldn’t be able to watch the interminable numerous debates.
Finally, a baseball team the Astros can beat
Which is why I didn’t see Perry commit his brain freezes, of which there were many. (My theory is that he was still hopped up on goofballs from his back operation.)
Percocet makes me see tiny little Jim Hightowers, and I have to grab and crush each and every one of them
Having lived in Texas for the entirety of Rick Perry’s tenure as governor, I can attest that he is not a perfect candidate. There have been times (Gardasil, the Trans-Texas Corridor) when he’s strayed from conservative principles. And he’s not as polished as Mitt Romney or as articulate as Newt Gingrich.
But Perry isn’t running against the second coming of Ronald Reagan, or even Sarah Palin. Every other major Republican contender is not only at least as flawed, they’re considerably more so.
Despite cheer-leading from the likes of Kathryn Jean Lopez and Jennifer Rubin, Mitt Romney has always struck me as a phony without any real core convictions except that he should be in charge; sort of the Republican answer to Bill Clinton, without the charm or adultery. Pick an issue and Romney’s been on both sides of it at one time or another. He seems the most likely of all the major candidates to be praised by The New York Times and The Washington Post for “growing” in office. Romney is most likely to disappoint me in caving in to D.C.’s usual free-spending, pork-barrel log-rolling.
I could get behind voting for the Newt Gingrich of 1994, the one whose laser-like focus on the holding the Democrats accountable for their misdeed and promoting the Contract With America helped Republicans take the House and Senate, set the stage for a welfare reform and helped (temporarily) balance the budget. Sadly, that Gingrich is not up on offer. We have to deal with the idea-a-minute-and-many-of-them-bad, ex-lobbyist, “Big Government Conservative” Newt Gingrich of 2012, the one so devastatingly and accurately skewered by Mark Steyn in this week’s National Review. (As Bruce Sterling once said at a Turkey City Writer’s Workshop, “Cruel, but fair!”) No matter how many times he tries to sound like Reagan, there are all those other times when he sounds like everyone from Al Gore to Faith Popcorn. I imagine that I would be disappointed many times in a Gingrich Presidency. Unlike Romney, I’m sure Gingrich would find entirely new and innovative ways to disappoint me.
I could almost get behind Ron Paul, based on his absolute, rock-steady position on the biggest problem facing America: out-of-control government spending and ever-increasing size and power of the federal government. The debt bomb is an existential threat to American prosperity, and If we don’t shrink government and get the deficit under control, none of the other issues really matter. And I lean heavily on the libertarian side of the spectrum. But even given that, there’s just too much weirdness (what Kevin Williamson called “his Ronness”) about the rest of Paul’s policies: the newsletters, the footsie with racism, the conspiracy theories, the weirdness about gays and wishing Israel didn’t exist, the running against Reagan. Being just one of 435 House members was a great place for Paul to be, since he could bring up conservative and Libertarian issues without any chance that his wackier ideas would ever end up in legislation, but the Presidency is a different kettle of fish. Plus there’s the problem of his electability, or rather lack thereof. With all his diverse baggage, I believe that Paul is the GOP candidate Obama would have the best chance of defeating. Ignore all the hard-left liberals talking up Paul as a better choice than Obama; it’s just a smokescreen that would evaporate at the first excuse to jump back on the Obama bandwagon. William F. Buckley always said conservative should support the right-most viable candidate. I don’t think Paul is a viable candidate.
Michelle Bachmann’s star has faded even more than Perry’s, and she doesn’t have Perry’s executive experience or record on job creation. The fact she’s neither dumb nor crazy doesn’t mean the MSM won’t pull the Full Sarah Palin Treatment on her (Andrew Sullivan womb-diving optional) were she to get the nod.
Rick Santorum: Too little, too late, he lost his last election, and his strengths don’t lie in the economy and job creation.
Jon Huntsman: Which part of “Republican” was unclear?
By process of elimination, that leaves Perry. As I said before, Perry isn’t perfect, but he has a record on holding the line on government spending and enabling job creation that puts Romney to shame. One again, let’s go to the charts that the indispensable Will Franklin of Willisms has provided on Texas job creation:
And the case for Perry over Romney (again thanks to WILLisms) is even more stark:
While I have criticized Perry’s campaign budget proposals for being too timid, Perry insisted on balancing the Texas budget without tax hikes. I assure you that California would love to have Texas’ budget. Indeed, adjusted for inflation, population growth, and federally-mandated spending, the Texas state budget has actually gone down under Perry. His guiding principle has been “don’t spend all the money,” and it’s one that Washington desperately needs.
One final, very big reason to support Perry: He can win. Perry’s never lost a race, because he’s a tough and tenacious campaigner who’s not afraid to hit his opponents hard. Everyone thought Kay Bailey Hutchison was going to cream Perry in the 2010 governor’s race, and he beat her like a rented mule.
Or maybe a rented donkey.
In the general election against Bill White, he ran an ad featuring a police widow talking about how her husband had been killed by a multi-arrested illegal alien while White was touting Houston as a “sanctuary city.”
Even professional MSM Perry hater Paul Burka says that Perry is a hard man. “He is the kind of politician who would rather be feared than loved.” Perry will have absolutely no fear of taking the fight to Obama and going negative early and often, and he won’t let political correctness cow him into treating Obama with kid gloves.
Will the media savage Rick Perry for his flubs? Of course they will. But, as Ace noted, they’ll always find a way to crucify any Republican candidate to make Obama look better. They’ll use the same “he’s an idiot” line of attack they used on Reagan and Bush43…and you saw how far that got them.
If you’re still undecided on Perry, this video should at least give you a more rounded picture of him:
For those who think Perry is already out of the race, remember that at this point in 2004, the consensus was that Howard Dean was going to be the nominee. There’s a reason Americans actually get to vote, and they frequently prove the pundits wrong.
With his annual year in review. This year’s theme (ever so appropriate for the Obama Administration): “The Festival of Sleaze.” Some highlights:
“The month’s biggest story is a tragedy in Tucson, where a man opens fire on a meet-and-greet being held by U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. The accused shooter turns out to be a mentally unstable loner with a history of drug use; there is no evidence that his actions had anything to do with uncivil political rhetoric. So naturally the blame for the tragedy is immediately placed on: uncivil political rhetoric.
“In Europe, the economic crisis continues to worsen, especially in Greece, which has been operating under a financial model in which the government spends approximately $150 billion a year while taking in revenue totaling $336.50 from the lone Greek taxpayer, an Athens businessman who plans to retire in April. Greece has been making up the shortfall by charging everything to a MasterCard account that the Greek government applied for — in what some critics consider a questionable financial practice — using the name ‘Germany.'”
“The European economic crisis worsens still further as Moody’s downgrades its credit rating for Spain following the discovery that the Spanish government, having run completely out of money, secretly sold the Pyrenees to China and is now separated from France only by traffic cones.”
“A major crisis is barely avoided when Congress, after frantic negotiations, reaches a last-minute agreement on the federal budget, thereby averting a government shutdown that would have had a devastating effect on the ability of Congress to continue spending insanely more money than it actually has.”
“Things are even worse in Europe, where Moody’s announces that it has officially downgraded Greece’s credit rating from ‘poor’ to ‘rat mucus’ following the discovery that the Acropolis has been repossessed.”
“May: the big story takes place in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden, enjoying a quiet evening chilling in his compound with his various wives and children and porn stash, receives an unexpected drop-in visit from a team of Navy SEALs. After due consideration of bin Laden’s legal rights, the SEALs convert him into Purina brand Shark Chow; he is then laid to rest in a solemn ceremony concluding upon impact with the Indian Ocean at a terminal velocity of 125 miles per hour. While Americans celebrate, the prime minister of Pakistan declares that his nation (a) is very upset about the raid and (b) had no earthly idea that the world’s most wanted terrorist had been living in a major Pakistani city in a large high-walled compound with a mailbox that said BIN LADEN.”
“August: Standard & Poor’s makes good on its threat to downgrade the U.S. credit rating, noting that the federal government, in making fiscal decisions, is exhibiting ‘the IQ of a turnip.’ Meanwhile Wall Street becomes increasingly jittery as investors react to Federal Reserve Board Chairman Bernanke’s surprise announcement that his personal retirement portfolio consists entirely of assault rifles.”
“President Obama returns from his Martha’s Vineyard getaway refreshed and ready to tackle the job he was elected by the American people to do: seek reelection. Focusing on unemployment, the president delivers a nationally televised address laying out his plan for creating jobs, which consists of traveling around the nation tirelessly delivering job-creation addresses until it’s time for another presidential getaway.”
“Mitt Romney unexpectedly exhibits a lifelike facial expression but is quickly subdued by his advisers.”
“An International Monetary Fund audit of the 27-nation European Union reveals that 11 of the nations are missing…Meanwhile in Greece, thousands of rioters take to the streets of Athens to protest a tough new government austerity program that would sharply reduce the per diem rioter allowance.”
“Attorney General Eric Holder announces that the FBI has uncovered a plot by Iran to commit acts of terror in the United States, including assassinating the Saudi ambassador, bombing the Israeli Embassy, and—most chillingly—providing funding for traveling productions of ‘Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.'”
Not that I need to tell you, but read the whole thing.
The year winds down, and I have a bunch of more-or-less lengthy posts in various stages of completion. You know what that means? That’s right! LinkSwarm!
Charles Murray concludes that more prisons means less crime. “Higher imprisonment was the necessary condition for 100 percent of the reduction in violent crime.”
I spent a few minutes on the phone yesterday and today with Dr. Joe Agris, who recently filed as a Republican for the Texas Senate race.
As previously mentioned, Dr. Agris is a plastic surgeon who has done numerous good works, many in association with late Houston broadcasting legend Marvin Zindler (who frequently made use of Dr. Agris services). Dr. Agris waged a campaign for Texas House District 134 in 2008, losing in the general election. “That was Obama’s year. All Republicans in Harris County lost.”
I asked why he was running. He said that voters will “trust a doctor” more than politicians, who he accused of having “constipation of thought and diarrhea of words.” He said his biggest issue was the budget deficit. “The federal government needs a balanced budget amendment.”
ObamaCare was also a particular target of the doctor’s ire: “This Obama medical bill is just an atrocity. We have to get rid of it. The medical care in this country is just going downhill.”
He also had some stinging criticisms of the current state of American healthcare, noting how rules might require a patient to undergo an increasingly expensive series of tests, when only the first and last may be necessary. “If you don’t do things step by step, Medicare and insurance won’t pay for it. 50% of the doctors in my hospital don’t take Medicare. If these cuts go through in February, it will be closer to 100%.”
Dr. Agris also complained about the short-sighted nature of the federal government. “China is our biggest threat. They have plans out to 100 years, and we can’t plan out two weeks. We just have knee-jerk responses. We need 1-year, 2-year, 5- or 10-year plans.”
Given his concern over the deficit, I asked him which programs would he cut. That gave him pause. He finally named foreign aid and military deployments overseas.
He was particularly critical of our efforts in an area he’s visited many times. “I just got back from Afghanistan and Pakistan. We’re not doing any good over there. They just want to take our money.”
Dr. Agris said he had the financial resources to wage a serious senate campaign. “I’ll self-fund some, and we’ll raise some.”
Dr. Agris sounds like an interesting guy, and might have more resources to campaign with than some other longshots. But he’s entered the race very late indeed, he’s virtually unknown outside of Houston, he’s facing three well-organized, well-funded candidates who have been running hard most of the year (plus a fourth, Craig James, who has much higher name recognition than Dr. Agris), and so far it does not sound like he’s thought through the intellectual and organizational demands it takes to run a serious Senate campaign in state as large as Texas. And the good doctor’s Brooklyn accent may not play well statewide.
But I do thank Dr. Agris, both for his many previous good works and for taking the time to speak with me.
