Time for another roundup of Texas, Red State Champion, versus Blue State California:
Posts Tagged ‘waste’
Texas vs. California Roundup for December 11, 2013
Wednesday, December 11th, 2013Texas vs. California Roundup for November 11, 2013
Monday, November 11th, 2013Time for another roundup of Texas vs. California:
This Just In: ObamaCare Still Sucks
Wednesday, October 30th, 2013Suddenly, Democrats aren’t sounding so all-fire sure about ObamaCare after all. “After 16 long days of vowing to Republicans that they would not cave in any way, shape or form on ObamaCare, Democrats spent their first post-shutdown week caving in every way, shape and form.”
Jonah Goldberg gets in some solid whacks on the idiot pushback from Democratic mouthpieces: “Obama’s [#ObamaCare] statements were not ‘narrowly untrue.’ They were broadly, knowingly and entirely untrue.”
Also:
The president and the Democrats lied us into a bad law. The right opposed the law on principle. A single party — the Democrats — own this law in a way that no party has had complete ownership of any major social legislation in a century. They bought this legislation with deceit and the GOP said so. Now that it is going into effect, the facts on the ground are confirming that deceit. Moreover, the same haughty condescending bureaucrats and politicians who told us they were smart enough and tech-savvy enough to do just about anything are being exposed as incompetent political hacks.
Charles Cooke debunks the single payer fantasy and the myth of Republican responsibility for ObamaCare:
Obamacare was passed into law without a single Republican vote; its passage led to the biggest midterm blowout since 1948; and repealing the measure has been, to borrow Harry Reid’s favorite word, the “obsession” of Republicans for nearly five years. It is a law based upon an idea that Republican leadership failed to consider, debate, or advance during any of the periods in which they have held political power — and one that they actively opposed when it was suggested in a similar form by President Clinton during the 1990s. If Republicans were desperate to get something done along the lines that Obama proposed in 2009, they have had a funny way of showing it over the past 159 years.
Also, “single payer,” i.e. the Democrats platonic ideal of fully socialized medicine, was so horribly unpopular with the public that it never had a chance of passing:
There is a devastatingly dull reason the bulletproof Democratic majority of 2008 didn’t build “comprehensive health insurance on Social Security and Medicare,” and that is that it didn’t have the votes. Indeed, with full control of the government, Democrats didn’t even have the votes to set up a public insurance option, let alone to take over the whole system. Long before Scott Brown was elected to the Senate, Ezra Klein was lamenting that the public option was dead on arrival.
Charles Krauthammer also goes to town on Jay Carney’s smarmy dishonesty:
The Obama Administration wrote regulations that actually made the situation worse. (Hat tip: Ace, who notes that NBC tried to neuter their original version to make it less critical of Obama).
Mark Steyn on the website debacle. Bonus: The same firm who coded the ObamaCare website also coded the incompetent, bloated, non-functioning Canadian Firearms registry:
Their most famous government project was for the Canadian Firearms Registry. The registry was estimated to cost in total $119 million, which would be offset by $117 million in fees. That’s a net cost of $2 million. Instead, by 2004 the CBC (Canada’s PBS) was reporting costs of some $2 billion — or a thousand times more expensive.
Yeah, yeah, I know, we’ve all had bathroom remodelers like that. But in this case the database had to register some 7 million long guns belonging to some two-and-a-half to three million Canadians. That works out to almost $300 per gun — or somewhat higher than the original estimate for processing a firearm registration of $4.60.
So how did CGI get the gig? Well, the fact that executive Toni Townes-Whitley was an old friend of Michelle Obama’s, having been in the Organization of Black Unity together at Princeton, and who visited the Obama White House several times, might have something to do with it.
It also promotes racism, with “sections that factor in race when awarding billions in contracts, scholarships and grants” and give “preferential treatment to minority students for scholarships.” It also “creates separate and unequal operating standards for long-term care facilities that serve racial and ethnic minorities.”
A few more nuggets:
Texas vs. California Update for July 24, 2013
Wednesday, July 24th, 2013Smart denizens of California must be eying Detroit’s bankruptcy warily. After all, 60 years ago Detroit was the wealthiest city in America. And California seems hellbent on following Detroit’s Blue State path to bankruptcy sooner rather than later…
Bruce Malkenhorst took home more than $911,000 a year as city manager of the tiny city of Vernon. His reign ended shortly
before he was convicted of misappropriating public funds, and he walked away with an annual pension that eventually topped $500,000,
the largest in the California Public Employees’ Retirement System.But CalPERS last year decided to cut his pension to $115,000, concluding he’d derived some of his hefty salary improperly.
So now the 78-year-old Malkenhorst is suing Vernon to make up the difference.
And if you’re interested in California corruption, you should be following Dwight’s regular updates on Vernon and Bell.
European Debt Crisis Update for July 22, 2013
Monday, July 22nd, 2013It’s shaping up to be another busy week, so here’s a quick update on the European Debt Crisis front:
Texas vs. California Roundup for July 11, 2013
Thursday, July 11th, 2013The hot days of summer are here. Texas is now into its usual 100° summer days. However, if it’s any consolation, Death Valley hit a record 129° in June.
Texas’ business climate is a lot like our summers: hot, hot, hot! California’s business climate is a lot like Death Valley: Still and oppressive.
On to the Texas vs. California roundup:
European Debt Crisis Update for July 10, 2013
Wednesday, July 10th, 2013The ongoing European Debt Crisis hasn’t ended, it’s merely undergoing a summer hiatus while the various bankers and Eurocrats involved in the shell game take their customary 8 week vacations. As such, expect a new round of crisis headlines to come rolling in during the fall.
Remember: The purpose of the shell game is to let insiders unload their bad debts onto taxpayers. (Look how it was done in Ireland for pointers.) The shell game will continue as long as the insiders can get away with buying off restive electorates with an unsustainable cradle-to-grave welfare state.
Europe’s present is our future.
Texas vs. California Update for 6/17/13
Monday, June 17th, 2013Time for another Texas vs. California roundup!
Greece: More Bailouts, More Fake Austerity
Wednesday, April 17th, 2013While attention was focused on the Boston bombing, Gosnell, and gay marriage, Greece just got another bailout. This is in exchange for further “austerity.”
What sort of “austerity” is Greece practicing? The sort that involves deficit spending at 10% of GDP, which is up from 9%. It was supposed to be cut to 7.5%.
So Greece wants more money because it can’t even keep to its previous promises on its fake austerity goals.
Let me explain it once again: Real austerity is cutting spending until it matches incoming receipts. Not reducing the rate of deficit spending. Not raising taxes so politicians can continue to spend.
No country in the EU (at least outside the Baltics) has practiced real austerity. That Forbes piece on the Baltic nations includes a lot of good advice that EU nations are largely ignoring:
Don’t run up big debts. It is a lot easier to manage when things go bad if you aren’t overextended to start. Observed Rosenberg: “Estonia’s experience shows that prudent policies during the boom may not avoid a bust, but they can put the country into a better position to deal with shocks.”
Don’t engage in an orgy of “stimulus” spending. That will run up big debts without generating long-term growth. When budgets eventually are cut, as they will have to be, the economic loss and political pain will be even greater.
Make tough decisions early. People typically are ready to act after the crisis hits. In the case of Latvia, argued Asmussen, by acting swiftly “most of the required painful budgetary decisions could be passed before the so-called ‘adjustment fatigue’ kicked in.”
Maintain fiscal responsibility. Otherwise any progress will be transitory. Growth is the natural result of reform. Delaying reform exacerbates the problem while prematurely terminating reform short-circuits the recovery.
Emphasize budget cuts. Expansive and irresponsible public outlays usually contribute to economic crisis. Moreover, the state as well as citizens should sacrifice after a crash. The answer is to cut expansive and irresponsible public outlays. In fact, economists Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna found that “spending cuts are much more effective than tax increases in stabilizing the debt and avoiding economic downturns. In fact, we uncover several episodes in which spending cuts adopted to reduce deficits have been associated with economic expansions rather than recessions.”
Finally, don’t rest on one’s laurels. There always is more to do. Even nations which have implemented serious reform programs, like the Baltic States, could make further improvements.
As far as I can tell, none of the core EU states (and certainly none of the PIIGS) has tried this approach since the 2008 recession hit. They keep trying Neo-Keynesian pump-priming and deficit spending to keep both the Euro and their unsustainable welfare state afloat, and they keep experiencing endless recession. Their fake austerity comes in slightly reducing the amount of their deficit spending enough to pretend they’re in compliance to keep the bailouts coming. Ireland hasn’t practiced real austerity. Neither has Portugal, Spain, or Italy (though Italy has come closest).
The shell game of bailouts and fake austerity will continue as long as the Eurocrats can keep getting away with it.
