On Thursday, April 3, 2012, the Barack Obama re-election campaign released “The Life of Julia.” In it are 12 stages in the life of “Julia,” a fictional woman used to demonstrate how Obama’s policies would help her. Throughout the stages in her life, Julia is depicted as someone who benefits from the programs either created by or funded by Obama. The obvious message is that a vote for Obama will keep the largesse flowing for all, not just fictional Julia.

One very real problem with the “Julia” concept is that throughout the 12 stages nowhere is it mentioned that “Julia” ever gives back for any of the benefits she receives. That is particularly true when “Julia” is 27 years old, when she is 31 years old, when she is 37 years old, when she is 42 years old, and when she’s 67 years old.

The ad says that when “Julia” is 27 years old, she “…has worked full-time as a web designer.” Nowhere is there a mention of her “giving back,” to, as Elizabeth Warren says, “…pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

The ad continues, “Thanks to Obamacare, her health insurance is required to cover birth control ….” Now, as a man, I cannot put myself in “Julia’s” shoes, but I can think of only one reason why she would need birth control – promiscuity (women readers, please help me here). Assuming that I am correct, I (and about half of US citizens) should see some direct benefit from the money we (involuntarily) spent. Does the ad mention that? As (the late) John Belushi used to say on SNL, “Noooooooooooooooooooooooo.”

The ad says that when “Julia” is 31 years old, she “…decides to have a child.” Nowhere is a husband mentioned, so the assumption of promiscuity is supported. Again, we taxpayers who are forced to support her decision receive no direct benefits, no giving back. At this time I think it best to say that a vast majority of taxpayers would not want direct benefits from “Julia.” But that’s not the point here. We taxpayers would like to see some direct benefit from money we are paying. But the ad fails to mention how we, who pay for HER decision, will ever receive or even see the benefits.

The ad continues, “Throughout her pregnancy, she benefits from maternal checkups, prenatal care, and free screenings under health care reform.” Focus on the word “free.”

First, nothing is free. Someone, somewhere, somehow paid for “Julia’s” free services. That is true unless she somehow got the doctors, nurses, medical technicians, and office workers to donate their time, efforts, and supplies to support her decision. And that doesn’t include all the other people she had to get to donate time: the cement workers, carpenters, electricians, and roofers who built the office where she received “free” services, the banker who financed the office, the salespeople who sold all the supplies to build the office, all the people who manufactured the building supplies, or the people who provided transportation to the office. The list is literally endless.

Second, there is no free lunch, as the old saying goes. Some quid pro quo is expected. As the Merriam-Webster dictionary so well puts it, “In politics nobody does something for nothing: there’s always a quid pro quo involved.” The quid pro quo here is rather obvious: “Julia” (and all like her) should vote for Obama in order to keep all the free services coming.

The ad says that when “Julia” is 37 years old, “Julia’s son Zachary starts kindergarten.” This means that the entire “Julia” cycle begins anew.

The ad says that when “Julia” is 42 years old, she, “…starts her own web business.” That’s great for “Julia,” but did she design a web page for me or any other taxpayers? The ad continues, “President Obama’s tax cuts for small businesses like Julia’s help her to get started.” Again, great for “Julia,” but do we taxpayers see any direct benefit from the tax cuts? Nothing mentions anything about her giving back to any taxpayers who supported her.

The ad says that when “Julia” is 67 years old, she, “…retires.” The ad continues, “After years of contributing to Social Security, she receives monthly benefits that help her retire comfortably,….” There are at least two things wrong with this concept.

First, there is the “retire comfortably” concept. As can be seen here, many seniors are not able to retire comfortably. Here are two examples:

• Bettye Guillory 98, of Federal Way, WA, gets $1,354 a month from Social Security. Of that, she pays $1,105 a month for room and board in an adult family home (Medicare pays the rest) and about $185 a month for health insurance. She has less than $65 a month for other expenses. With less than $65 a month to spend, she can’t buy the fresh fruits and vegetables, real orange juice, green tea and organic eggs she’d like to have to supplement her diet.
• Imogene Goss, 80, of Kansas City, MO, likes to walk around a lake that is six or seven miles from her home. But when Goss calculated that driving to the lake was costing her $5 a week, she brought her exercise routine back home.

The last cost-of-living increase for Social Security recipients and federal retirees was in 2009. Retirees on fixed incomes are looking for ways to economize as prices of essential goods increase and their incomes remain unchanged. And the situation is only going to get worse. As Charles Krauthammer wrote in March, 2011, “The Social Security trust fund is a fiction.” Further, people who depend on Social Security alone can expect a “minimum wage” lifestyle. Comfortable, indeed!

Second, why should I (or any taxpayer) be forced to support “Julia’s” retirement? It’s fine if I choose to support her retirement, but the last time I looked, FICA taxes withheld were mandatory. Do I receive any direct benefit from supporting her retirement? Is “Julia” going to give back by supporting my retirement? As Linda Chavez wrote, “…Social Security recipients receive more in benefits over their lifetimes than they and their employers contributed in taxes during their working years, the system functions only because there are enough current workers making additional payments into the fund. This is why some people describe Social Security as a giant pyramid scheme.” Somehow the ad fails to mention “Julia’s solution to this problem, only that she retires comfortably.

But the ad does say that Social Security will “help her retire comfortably.” The key word here is “help.” The implication is that “Julia” is able to be comfortable by combining personal savings with Social Security. She should be able to save vast amounts of money since there is a taxpayer funded program for everything else she needs in life.

Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter of the Barack Obama “Truth Team” had this to say about “The Life of Julia”: “It’s a great tool for the Truth Team and our goal of making sure everyone gets the facts they need.”

The only problems with “The Life of Julia” are that, (1) everything in the ad is, sadly, true, that there is a program for every stage of “Julia’s” life for which we taxpayers pay and pay and …, (2) nowhere is it mentioned that we taxpayers ever receive any benefits from supporting “Julia,” (3) or that “Julia” exhibit any personal responsibility for any actions she takes or decisions she makes (other than the retirement implication), and (4) nowhere does anyone, least of all “Julia,” identify how these benefits will be paid for.

But then I guess we are mean and heartless for expecting “Julia” to look after herself, to experience the results of her decisions, to delay some gratification in favor of inevitable old age.

If ever there was an illustration of the difference between conservatism and liberalism, “The Life of Julia” is it.

But that’s just my opinion.

”It isn’t so much that liberals are ignorant. It’s just that they know so many things that aren’t so.” – Ronald Reagan

Cross-posted at RWNO, my personal web site.

While I find Romney to be a poor Republican candidate, and not really a conservative at all, I find agreement with him on some issues and this one I do.

Yesterday Obama released the creepy slideshow “The Life of Julia” in which they depict how a female is taken care of from cradle to grave by the taxpayer. It’s a perfect example of the welfare state that is bankrupting this country. In the utopian world of Julia she gets money for college, for her medical bills, she gets to sue her employer for more money, she gets free contraception, loans for a business, and then some retirement money until she dies. Somehow Obama believes we will have the money for all that for the next 80 years.

It’s a tall tale for sure.

Rich Lowry

Julia’s central relationship is to the state. It is her educator, banker, health-care provider, venture capitalist, and retirement fund. And she is, fundamentally, a taker. Every benefit she gets is cut-rate or free. She apparently doesn’t worry about paying taxes. It doesn’t enter her mind that the programs supporting her might add to the debt or might have unintended consequences. She has no moral qualms about forcing others to pay for her contraception, and her sense of patriotic duty is limited to getting as much government help as she can.

The alleged benefits to Julia are exaggerated or nonexistent. Pity the poor thing if she depends on Head Start for her launch into the world. A study by the Department of Health and Human Services last year found that positive educational effects tend to wear off by the first grade. The government assistance she gets for financing college feeds into the maw of inexorable tuition increases. The chances that the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is going to boost her pay, as a web designer, are essentially nil. Julia is getting punked.

Her life is framed to show that she gets more from President Barack Obama than from Republicans. The same contrast could be achieved differently. She could lose her web-design job and go on unemployment, which President Obama always wants to extend despite Republican objections. With her family’s income dropping, she could resort to the food-stamp program, which has expanded massively under President Obama despite Republicans’ inveighing against the trend. These examples don’t suit the campaign’s purposes, though. They show government to be a poor substitute for the robust recovery that President Obama hasn’t delivered even as he has endeavored to make Julia’s birth-control pills free.

The point of view of “The Life of Julia” is profoundly condescending. It assumes that giving people things will distract them from larger considerations of the public weal — the economy, debt, the health of the culture.

Now where do I find agreement with Romney? Here he answers a question from a real version of Julia:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I agree with him, but does he really mean it? Romneycare may suggest otherwise.

The Obamacare individual mandate demands that everyone have insurance coverage and penalizes those who do not carry insurance.

The fine for not purchasing health insurance under PPACA is $95 per person in 2014 (or 1% of taxable income, whichever is greater), $325 in 2015 (or 2%), and $695 in 2016 (or 2.5%). Thereafter, the mandate is indexed to inflation.

But hold on, there are exemptions:

In addition, many people are exempted from the mandate, such as those for whom premiums exceed 8 percent of household income. Hence, as premiums increase, more and more people will be exempted from the mandate.

So those exempted not only won’t pay the penalty, they will absolutely no incentive to spend a penny on health care coverage until they get sick and now they cannot be refused. Obamacare- it’s like going to a bank and making a $1000 withdrawal without ever opening an account. Not long ago this was called robbery.

Never mind that the architect of this disaster now says not only will it not save money, it’s going to cost a lot more:

In Wisconsin, Gruber reported that people purchasing insurance for themselves on the individual market would see, on average, premium increases of 30 percent by 2016, relative to what would have happened in the absence of Obamacare. In Minnesota, the law would increase premiums by 29 percent over the same period. Colorado was the least worst off, with premiums under the law rising by only 19 percent.

Never mind that none of the promises Obama made- keeping your plan, keeping your doctor, lowering premium costs- are worthless.

No, penalizing people for not having insurance is not a burden. Sheila-Jackson Lee, (D-Idiot), say it’s a positive thing. In Rep. Jackson-Lee’s view, however, this language does not actually impose a penalty. Not only that, but it’s like the civil rights struggle.

“I would make the argument, one, that instead it is an incentive to do right–that it is not penalizing because penalty is punishment,” Jackson-Lee told the Judiciary Committee.

“You’re not punished if you have health insurance, in fact. And so you are, in fact, incentivized to have health insurance, rather than take the negative which is to suggest that because we have a penalty you are being punished,” Rep. Jackson-Lee said.

“I am helping you. I am helping you not to have 26 percent un-insurance in the state of Texas. I’m helping children be insured. I’m helping diverse minorities be insured,” said Rep. Jackon-Lee. “And I know during the civil rights argument–even though we were arguing under the Constitution–there were many policy statements being made: Do we want to live in a nation that discriminates against a person because of the color of their skin? In addition to the constitutional argument, do we want to live in a nation where there are people being uninsured causing catastrophic costs unto the nation and others have to pay. I think that is the question that needs to be considered by the courts.”

And parking tickets? They’re a positive thing too.

“But I also need to say whether or not it is more an incentive than it is a punishment,” said Rep. Jackson-Lee. “I am more inspired by incentive. And I welcome it being a parking ticket. We get parking tickets all the time, and no one complains about being required to do the right thing.”

Eric Holder has blocked the South Carolina voter ID law on the basis that it unfairly burdens some potential voters:

The Justice Department on Friday rejected South Carolina’s law requiring voters to show photo identification at the polls, saying it makes it harder for minorities to cast ballots. It was the first voter ID law to be refused by the federal agency in nearly 20 years.

The Obama administration said South Carolina’s law didn’t meet the burden under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which outlawed discriminatory practices preventing blacks from voting. Tens of thousands of minorities in South Carolina might not be able to cast ballots under South Carolina’s law because they don’t have the right photo ID, Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez said.

The Supreme Court has upheld a similar law in Indiana.

South Carolina ID’s would be provided at no cost and South Carolina has even offered to provide free transportation to obtain one.

The Carter-Baker Commission of 2005 said voter ID was no burden:

A bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform in 2005 chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III found no evidence that requiring photo IDs would suppress the minority vote. The panel recommended a national photo ID system and a campaign to register voters.

Want to see a side-splitter?

What’s wrong with showing identification when you vote? That’s an egregious civil rights violation if you ask the Obama Administration and liberal groups like the Center for American Progress, and the Advancement Project. So what happens if you show up at the front door of these groups without ID? Find out on this PJTV undercover investigation.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So it’s a burden to have to have an ID to vote, but it is not a burden to have to pay a penalty for not having insurance under Obamacare, and you can’t into the offices of those who say it’s a burden to have to have an ID without an ID.

You can’t make this stuff up.

If one person doesn’t need an ID to vote, than neither do I. And if I don’t need an ID to vote, then I don’t need one to board a plane or drive a car. It’s discriminatory. But that’s not this is all about. As wrote back in January, this election is all about fraud. Obama absolutely depends on it to win re-election. The more the left whines, the more dependent on fraud they are.

This past week the Supreme Court heard arguments for and against ObamaCare. The decision, expected to be handed down in June may very well be the single most important case in the history of the United States.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, the perennial swing vote on the court pinpointed the argument on Tuesday:

Here the government is saying that the federal government has a duty to tell the individual citizen that it must act, and that is different from what we have in previous cases, and that changes the relationship of the federal government to the individual in a very fundamental way.

He is making the observation that if ObamaCare stands, the federal government can not only tell you what you are prohibited from doing, but at the same time it can tell you what you must do.

Donald Verrilli, the administration’s attorney, suggests that the reason the government can regulate the healthcare market is that that everyone participates in it at some point.

Justice Scalia points out that everyone participates in the food market and therefore the government could use that rationale to force everyone to buy broccoli.

Verrilli’s retort: Though the two markets do share that one trait, they remain distinctly different. The healthcare market, he said, contains participation that is “often unpredictable and often involuntary.” The food market is not that.

Which in turn caused Justice Alito to ask about burial insurance, the cause of which is often unpredictable and almost always involuntary.

You can see where this is going. This gets us to the fundamental question about liberalism in general. When will enough regulation be enough? Will there ever come a point where liberals believe that there is simply enough government regulation in place and that they should stop making new laws? Is there a point where citizens are going to be allowed to exercise individual responsibility to the point that they are responsible for their own lives? From the federal government all the way down to local towns and counties, what one describes as freedom in America is rapidly shrinking.

The thing that liberals never seem to get is that the unknown factor in their plans for universal perfection (read equal outcomes) is the fact that it includes humans. There is nothing that humans have ever been involved in that is perfect, that is 100% successful or 100% safe. Yet liberals continue to push the envelope. And it’s not just about safety… it’s gotten to the point that New York City’s Department of Education believes it’s the government’s job to save people from getting their feelings hurt so they’ve put out a list of 50 topics that should not be used in tests because they might offend various people. Dinosaurs are on the list, presumably because it would offend people who don’t believe in evolution. Computers in the home cannot be mentioned (because not all kids will have computers in their homes) but mentioning a computer in a school environment is allowed.

Is there some point of minutia that is beyond the reach of liberals? John Stossel did a special recently called “Illegal Everything” about regulation and featured children from around the country being stopped from selling lemonade. In one case, in Midway, GA, one of the little girls’ father went to city hall to find out what law the girls had broken. No one knew, but the Chief of Police was clear about why they had to be stopped: We were not aware of how the lemonade was made, who made the lemonade, or what the lemonade was made with.

In the spirit of the times, I would like to suggest a new regulation. All men should be required to get a federal dating permit in order to strike up a conversation with a women in a bar or at the supermarket. Certainly some men lie about all sorts of things in order to get a woman into bed. From their jobs (or lack thereof) their salaries, their previous relationships, their education and even their marital status. Women across the country would be saved from ever getting their hearts broken or their purity despoiled. Licenses would be $25 per year and would have to be shown within the first 5 minutes of any intended coupling. The woman could scan the license with her smartphone and immediately know everything about her would be suitor.

Such as system would open a Pandora’s box of issues. What happens when a man changes jobs? How long does he have to update his license? What happens if he gets a raise? A cut in pay? Who decides if a previous relationship ended amicably, the man or the ex? Does she have the right or obligation to comment on the issuance of his license? How would a government computer weigh an acceptable honesty score? Does lying to your girlfriend about how beautiful your last girlfriend was generate enough positive points to outweigh the truth you told her about how bad her cooking is? Is there even a remote possibility that this could somehow make dating a better experience?

This may sound farfetched, but that’s what happens when government gets involved in practically anything. Education. Healthcare. Housing…

At the end of the day the United States, like every other society throughout history is guaranteed to be imperfect by the fact that it is made up of imperfect humans. Liberals make the mistake that collective decision making and rule making can move the nation farther down the road to perfection. It can’t and it won’t. The strange thing is, the more regulations they foist on the population, the more people become law breakers, inadvertent and otherwise. With over 100,000 federal regulations and literally millions of state and local ordinances it’s virtually impossible that individuals can go through any day without breaking some laws. With so many regulations, virtually everything is illegal, and it’s simply the whim of the regulators, politicians and police that decides who gets prosecuted and for what.

ObamaCare is the single most important court case in a century for one simple reason. It presents the American people with the clearest choice between freedom and statism since the calamitous 1942 decision in Wickard v. Filburn.

If the Supreme Court throws out the individual mandate and the rest of ObamaCare, perhaps citizens will finally feel like they have a fighting chance in taking on the borg that government has become and begin the process of rolling back the overreach that permeates every area of our lives.

On the other hand, if the Court upholds ObamaCare then it is the swan song of freedom as you know it. The United States will not collapse the next day or the next week or even within the next few years. It will however happen. Power corrupts absolutely and absolute power corrupts even more… A government bestowed with carte blanche will see no reason to ever curb its own power, and eventually it will take over everything. Lemonade anyone?

Obama is attacking the Supreme Court again. Last time he accused them of “reversing a century of law” which would lead to special interests, including foreign companies, to spend without limit during our elections. You may remember this occasion because Obama uttered the lie during his State of the Union speech, in front of all the justices and in response Justice Alito mouthed the words “not true.”

Now he attacks them again:

“Ultimately I am confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress,” Obama told reporters today while speaking with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderon.

Strong majority? Please.

It barely passed the house 219-212, hell…even 34 Democrats defected and voted against it and EVERY Republican voted against it as well.

So he lies once again.

Not only that, since it’s passing the public has been against it. No better proof of that then the 2010 election which saw 60 Democrats thrown out of office for supporting the unconstitutional law.

Exit quote: Obama won’t even defend DOMA in court, which got 85 votes in Senate (incl. Biden & Reid), 342 in House, signed by Clinton. O-care a far cry.

President Obama laid out his election strategy last night in a speech at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. That being the argument that it wasn’t the American people and their hard work, their creativity, their bravery that made America great. No, it was the government.

They’ve got one message and that is, we’re going to make sure that we cut people’s taxes even more – so that by every objective measure our deficit is worse and we will slash government investments that have made this country great, not because it’s going to balance the budget, but because it’s driven by our ideological vision about how government should be. That’s their agenda, pure and simple.

…We won’t win the race for new jobs and new businesses and middle-class security if we cling to this same old, worn-out, tired `you’re on your own’ economics that the other side is peddling. It was tried in the decades before the Great Depression. It didn’t work then. It was tried in the last decade. It didn’t work. You know, the idea you would keep on doing the same thing over and over again, even though it’s been proven not to work. That’s a sign of madness.”

Yup, the “you’re on your own” philosophy didn’t help to create a world superpower or one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world. Nope…NOW we’re a great country because Obama came in and instituted every kind of socialism possible.

Sigh…

As we enter the home stretch of our series of lectures to provide economic literacy for a group that has little or no experience with the economic realities that the rest of us face, we’re going to take the tone down a bit. Of course, after our last lesson explaining why your deficit spending is why you belong in jail, we have nowhere to go but down. Today we’re going to shift to the unintended consequences of your actions, and why so often your actions that you think are doing good actually cause more harm.

We’ll open up with two anecdotes to illustrate this claim. Shortly before Obamacare was passed I was talking with a friend who, with a few business partners, runs a company. The combination of the partners, admin staff, book keepers, etc. had them with a staffing level of 52 full time employees. We were talking about possible implications of the impending legislation and I asked how his business would react if the bill were passed. My friend shook his head and explained that, as it was being proposed at the time, Obamacare would exempt any small business with fewer than 50 employees. "Guess what happens to three of our staff", was his partnership’s mitigation strategy.

Another person I was talking to worked in education, and his role was in the semi-seasonal part of the field (no classes in summer). He was telling me that he and some coworkers started their own local electrical repair company. Unfortunately, they soon realized that the combination of taxation and regulatory hoops that they were forced to navigate led them to close their business down. You might be thinking that this is no big deal since there are plenty of electricians in the phone book (for younger readers, think of a dead-tree version of Google) and my friend still has his full time job with this venture only being extra money for him. Hopefully by now you’re seeing the bigger picture and understand the negative impact of this over-regulatory problem. This is less money that this business owner now has to spend and invest, and of course, pay tax revenue against. Consumers lose as well. Increased competition means that the electricians have to work harder to earn people’s business, whether through higher quality, lower prices, or faster service. Each competitor removed from the market means slightly less of these benefits available to the public. This is not to suggest that electricians should go unlicensed, as anyone who has had to deal with faulty wiring can attest, but you should be looking at the entire process of what is needed to start and run a business and ask yourself if you’re doing more harm than good.

Anecdotes are well and good, but they are not the basis for policy changes. I don’t want to follow the leftist arguments that generally follow the lines of, "This person lost everything because he had bad medical insurance – let’s destroy our existing health care system". I’m going to show you a real world macro example. I’ve used this before, and an instance was the luxury taxes passed back in 1991 when George "Read my lips…" Bush 41 caved into congressional Democrats and passed tax increases on luxury items, such as yachts, jewelry, and furs. The results were predictable, and since you’ve been paying attention to the past lessons, you’ve already figured out what happened. Lesson Two’s laws of supply and demand kicked in – when a good becomes more expensive, less of it is consumed. Sales of these luxury items plummeted. Thanks to the lost business the affected companies had to lay off workers and unsurprisingly the new revenues that elected officials banked on never materialized.

The same phenomena is still happening today, and on an ever expanding scale. With an overreaching government at the federal, state, and local levels so many of your colleagues are genuinely surprised that the economy hasn’t turned around as President Obama assured us. Having paid close attention to these lessons, you are naturally unsurprised by the current state of the economy. At the federal level, the looming specter of Obamacare hangs over every business. We have a law impacting how every organization handles its employees that is still being written a year and a half after its passage, as the Catholic Church just painfully learned. The Dodd-Frank bill has spawned new regulatory hoops for anyone who wants to invest in a business, complete with overlords who are immune from congressional oversight. At the state level, not surprisingly the states with the highest unemployment rates are generally the ones that enjoy the least economic freedom. During our honeymoon in New Orleans last year, Sister Babe and I went on a tour where we met an attorney from California. He remarked to us that he could walk into any business in his home state and easily find at least eight code violations. Sound far fetched? Look at the local level and how difficult it is just to open up an ice cream shop in San Francisco.

Unfortunately, this lack of understanding pervades up to the highest level of our government in the president himself. President Obama doesn’t seem to understand that when you make labor more expensive, you get fewer people hired. The president keeps talking about how he wants business to come back to America and expand, while being completely oblivious to the fact that he can immediately turn around and say that he strives to make them less profitable by raising taxes on their profits and investment. When I caught the highlights of his remarks (I never watch STOTUS addresses regardless of party or president, pure political cheerleading), I was reminded of that old saying, "You’re pointing up at the sky and telling me it’s raining, but when I look down you’re peeing on my leg." Even Steve Wynn, not exactly Rush Limbaugh in his political leanings, called out the president’s hostility toward prosperity.

Many of the political class scratch your heads in puzzlement as to why businesses are refusing to hire and are sitting on record levels of idle capital. Naturally, you share the same instincts as one legend of professional wrestling, and you may be thinking that those assets need to be confiscated.

What’s mine is mine… And what’s yours… It’s mine too!

You’ve already learned that businesses’ greed is not a bad thing, especially if you want to see low unemployment. To recap, business are in business to make money and be profitable. When there is a prospect to earn greater profits, businesses expand their operations, and when they expand, they need to hire more people to handle the additional work. So when you make pronouncements that the people who make the sacrifices and take the risks to be successful need to be punished in a manner completely arbitrarily set by you, they are naturally leery of earning too much profit right now. Let’s not also forget that more and more Americans are waking up to our ever expanding federal debt and the inevitable massive tax increases or inflation that will be needed to pay for it. When instead of hiring people to help grow their business they must first dedicate staff to dealing with all of the regulatory burdens you see fit to drop on them, they become reluctant to expand. And when hiring new employees means having to deal with Obamacare’s mandates or expanding with a new operation where the employees chose to not unionize can get you a call from Big Labor’s thugs in the NLRB, or learning that the EPA is working diligently to bankrupt you, hiring people doesn’t seem like such a good idea after all.

Leftists seethe at the fact that businesses are sitting on unprecedented levels of cash and are not using it to hire and expand. Given the current business climate, why would anyone expand? Sure, some companies are, but the new business model has become to invest in the campaigns of sympathetic politicians who will either steer business their way or regulate their competitors away. Granted, this sort of crony capitalism has always existed and will always exist, but it’s never been a good thing for an economy and it’s particularly worse when we have one in its current state. As distasteful as you may find it that businesses are sitting on all of this excess capital, remember that they are greedy, and if you take away the impediments to their profitability they will leap at the opportunity to get a jump on their competition.

You might be wondering why businesses aren’t hiring, given all of these great incentives you have given them? You’ve offered tax credit incentives for hiring veterans who have been out of work for more six months (As appealing as that may sound, guess what kind of impact this has on veterans who have been out of work for four or five months). There have been offerings of research and development and all kind of other tax credits for companies who hire. So why do we still have a real unemployment rate of over 10%? Remember, businesses live on a longer timeline than you do. Do you know who makes a long-term business decision to take advantage of a short term tax credit? That’s right – the businesses who are already planning to expand or hire anyway. Nobody makes a long term move that will impact them for years to come based on a quick cash grab. Here is another anecdote to illustrate this point. Back in my call center days I was working a job fair in search of inbound customer service reps. One candidate who approached me made her big selling point to me about her multiple disabilities (I remember her physically looking completely fine) and about all of the tax credits my employer would get for hiring her. All that I could think was, "How many days is she actually going to show up for a job where attendance is critical, and on top of the 50-60 hour work week I’m already putting in how much extra time am I going to have to spend dealing with paperwork for her or figuring out how to staff around her absences?" She wound up being interested in a different company that was there that day, but any short term benefits of hiring this person would be more than offset by long term headaches. And had she been interested, I would have been forced to follow that sad mantra of, "find a legal reason to not hire her."

By now I think you get the point of unintended consequences, but I want to show another example. Recently some treasure hunters found some centuries old sunken Spanish gold off of the coast of Florida. Naturally, the Spanish government wanted its gold back, and of course the treasure hunters wanted to keep their treasure. Both sides have fair claims – the hunters want to be compensated for their time, effort, and risk involved, and of course Spain wants the gold back that was taken from it. Although I sympathize more with the hunters, if Sister Babe and I were robbed of a large sum of cash and years later a private individual took it upon himself to find our money after the law had given up the search we would want every penny back. But in fairness to the bounty hunter, how much would we have gotten without his efforts? Zero. This is what Spain is saying the treasure hunters deserve for their efforts. A court ruled that Spain gets all of its money back today, and guess how much they can expect to see returned to them in the future? Probably around the same amount that they feel the treasure hunters deserve. The article is a short but good read, and at the end the author explains what we can expect to see in future efforts.

Of course, sometimes unintended consequences can have positive effects. Take the example of the businessman who moved from California to Washington. Upon realizing that Washington’s favorable tax laws left him with an extra $7,000 per year that would have been otherwise confiscated by the government, he did something radical and extreme with his money. You guessed it – he invested it in his business. He used it for business travel, to visit customers, and pump money back into the California economy as he worked to maintain his business relationships in the bay area. Are you learning yet?

I understand that unlike previous lessons this one did not have the same linear flow, and instead had this more chaotic mixture of theory, macro level effects and anecdotes. While putting this lesson together I considered grouping it into sections, but decided that leaving the lesson in its current format would help to drive home another point. That is, that the economy is such a vast and complex entity that trying to think that it can be neatly categorized, understood and controlled is simply impossible. There are too many factors and too many externalities for anyone to completely account for. Hopefully you are now beginning to understand that. You also now know that if you supported The Affordable Health Care Act, had you read and understood what its real impact would be, you would never make unintelligent or dishonest remarks like, "If you like your plan, you can keep it", or that "your premiums will not increase." Hopefully nobody would support such an incompetent leader such as that, right? If you’d like to see another "unintended" consequence of our president’s landmark piece of legislation, look at the impact it’s having on medical research and development.

Any journalists reading this might be wondering why, despite the title of this lesson that no mention has been made of journalism. The more perceptive pressies have probably already picked up on it. I am, of course, helping you to remove something from your vocabulary that taints so many of your stories regarding the economy. Yes, it is that favorite word of yours, "unexpected." Now that you understand that actions cause reactions, never again during the Obama presidency will you have to write headlines like "Jobless claims unexpectedly rise" or "Unemployment remains stubbornly high." Even the recent slightly positive news uses the same theory if you’ve been paying attention to the previous lessons. "Jobless claims unexpectedly at lowest level in …". When you have fewer people hired in the first place and so many already unemployed or discouraged workers who have given up the job search the number is not unexpectedly low. It’s not class warfare; it’s math. Hopefully in the not too distant future you will get to write a headline that reads, "Government unexpectedly takes its foot off of the throat of the private sector." But don’t hold your breath.

Up next: Chapter Ten: Solutions! or You’re not part of the problem – you are the problem.

Previous Lessons:

Lesson One: It’s Not Your Money

Lesson Two: Intro to Microeconomics, or Why Prices Matter

Lesson Three: Intro to Macroeconomics. or So that’s Where Government Fits In!

Lesson Four: You Don’t Create Jobs – It’s Time to Get Over FDR!

Lesson Four A: By Definition the Government Can Not Create Wealth

Lesson Five: Businesses are Greedy – That’s Not Necessarily a Bad Thing!

Lesson Six: You are Greedy – That is a Bad Thing!

Lesson Seven: You Don’t Invest; You Spend

Lesson Eight: Do You Know What an Unfunded Liability Is? It’s Why You Belong in Jail!

Cross Posted from Brother Bob’s Blog

From the title of this post you might think that this is yet another blog entry calling out leftist hypocrisy over Rush Limbaugh’s comments toward Sandra Fluke. There is no need for me to add to those arguments – leftist misogyny has already been well documented, at least when it comes to conservative women. Apparently love for diversity and respectful dialog ends for the leftist when a woman (or any other member of the permanent victimhood community based on their gender, race, or sexual orientation) strays from leftist orthodoxy. But I’m not just talking about conservative women today. The recent Fluke controversy shows the left’s disdain for all women.

How does this media circus prove that leftists hate all women? Look no further than the recently discovered "right" to free contraception – sterilizations services, birth control pills, and of course, morning after abortifacient pills. These of course, give the woman the freedom to explore their sexuality without fear of that most dreadful, life ruining condition that could impede their right to pleasure known as pregnancy. Anyone reading this who is old enough to remember the 80′s or 90′s will remember some buzzwords from those ancient times like "Herpes" and "AIDS". Not to mention many other joys that were around long before those days, such as syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia. Does anyone know how much protection that the "free" items from above offer from these diseases? That’s right, none. While other Sexually Transmitted Diseases’ (STDs) infection rates have remained steady over the years, chlamydia has been on the rise, and when this piece Obamacare is implemented, our government’s subsidy for unprotected sex will make these diseases even more widespread.

So if you enjoy warts on your genitalia, cold sores, a burning sensation when you pee, having to get penicillin treatments, just follow this administration’s "advice" for how you should take care of yourself. And if you’re lucky you’ll only get one of the maladies that’s actually curable. As the old joke goes, "What’s the difference between love and herpes? Herpes is forever!" (snare drum) Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week. Be sure to tip your bartenders.

If only there were a way to protect women from diseases that was not only reliable but also inexpensive… Yes, I am talking about condoms. They’re cheap, easily available, and actually will protect women (and men, who leftists hate even more) from STD’s. So why wouldn’t leftists favor condom use? There are several reasons:

• They’re cheap. In the left’s efforts to get the public to accept sacrificing any freedom over their health care decisions, having expensive medical needs are necessary to show why average citizens need the government to protect them.
• Condoms are easily accessible. The evil, capitalist system has crated a product that is so cheap and easy to purchase that it would be difficult for the government to swoop in and take over their distribution, thus the need to force solutions that are easier to control.
• It’s a nice payback for Big Pharma for not fighting too hard against Obamacare, forcing citizens to pay them more premiums for these services whether they have any need for them or not.
• If women get diseases and need treatment, that increases their dependency on Obamacare, and government in general. While that will sound insane to most people in the ears of a leftist, to use an Information Technology term, "It’s not a bug; it’s a feature."

"When you entertain your men don’t you know the risk of getting… disease?"

Does that last point sound far fetched? I’ll admit that it does, but consider this – if George W. Bush was putting record numbers of Americans onto food stamps, do you think the mainstream press would acknowledge this for the problem that it is, rather than pretend it is in any way compassionate or that criticism of said policy should be seen as racist. Making more women dependent on the government somehow equates liberation in the left’s eyes.

I understand that my last few points might make me sound like someone typing this in his pajamas as I adjust my tin foil hat. But can someone explain to me how opposing a policy whose net effect will be to hurt more womens’ health equates a “war on women”?

Cross Posted from Brother Bob’s Blog

Even some of the liberal judges appear skeptical about Obama’s defense of ObamaCare:

On the first day of oral arguments in the case challenging President Obama’s national health care law, justices seemed skeptical that the individual mandate should be considered a tax — one of the main consitutional defenses being offered for the law.

To be clear, today’s 90 minutes of oral arguments did not concern the underlying merits of the case, but whether an 1876 law called the Anti-Injunction Act bars the Court from ruling on the suit at this time. Under the Anti-Injunction Act, people cannot challenge a tax in court until after they have paid it, something that would effectively punt the issue until at least 2015. However, there is some overlap between this question and the idea of whether the mandate is a tax, and justices on both sides of the ideological fence expressed skepticism that the mandate should be treated as a tax.

“This cannot be a revenue raising measure, because if it’s successful, there won’t be any revenue raised,” said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the mandate.

Another liberal on the court, Justice Stephen Breyer, said of Congress’s description of the fine for non-compliance with the mandate, “They called it a penalty and not a tax for a reason.”

Alito came in for the swoop:

Justice Sam Alito asked Verrilli whether he could point to another case in which courts identified something as not a tax for the purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act while still ruling it was a constitutional exercise of taxing power. Verrilli could not name any.

Bam!

First Obama said the mandate wasn’t a tax, and then they said it is.

And now even the liberal judges of the Supreme Court are looking a bit wary on their argument.

Ed Morrissey:

That doesn’t bode well for ObamaCare advocates. If the mandate gets struck as a constitutional overreach, then regardless of whether the Supreme Court finds severability or not, the entire structure of ObamaCare collapses. It will hasten momentum for its repeal, and insurers will switch sides to demand its complete rejection.

And even Howard Dean believes the mandate will be struck down:

Dean, a former presidential candidate who also chaired the Democratic National Committee from 2005 to 2009, said on “CBS This Morning” that it’s “likely the individual mandate will be declared unconstitutional” but he expects the justices will sever that finding from the rest of the bill, meaning other elements, like the ban on denying people insurance based on pre-existing conditions, could remain in effect.

Howard Dean believes ObamaCare will survive if the mandate is struck down. Richard Epstein:

…if the individual mandate is struck down, does the rest of the law go down with it? As Abbe Gluck and Michael Graetz recently noted in the New York Times, both the Obama administration and the states opposing the program insist that the entire ACA will go down the tubes if the mandate is struck down. Their motivations of course diverge. The Obama administration thinks that the all-or-nothing position improves the odds that the mandate will be upheld, given the vast dislocations that will follow if it is struck down. The states think that the mandate is a loser on its own terms, and want to bring the rest of the statute down with it.

Both sides are wrong. As I have urged in a brief coauthored with Mario Loyola of the Texas Public Policy Foundation and Ilya Shapiro of the Cato Institute, Title I at the very least has to fall if the mandate is struck down because it is the only backstop that Congress put in to control adverse selection under the ACA. Writers like Gluck and Graetz are wrong to say that allowing severability rightly puts the issue back into the lap of the next Congress. A future Congress could easily be paralyzed on the issue, which leaves us with an incoherent structure. But we do know that the 111th Congress that passed this bill a year ago on March 23, 2010 did regard the two as indissoluble.

Just because the rest of Title I is not severable from the individual mandate does not mean that the mandate itself is saved from constitutional attack by propping up the Commerce Clause with the Necessary and Proper Clause. The key issue is this: Severability asks whether one part of the legislation can function as Congress intended if another part is stripped out. In contrast, the Necessary and Proper Clause only saves that legislation which is needed to make the statute cohere. As noted earlier, the individual mandate was only introduced as a second-best response to the ACA’s problem of adverse selection risk.

The mandate is not necessary for that purpose because there are other devices that do a far better job in coping with that omnipresent danger. And it is surely not proper to use an extraordinary remedy that expands the scope of Congressional power to achieve an end that could be controlled by more traditional means. Thus, restrictions on the power to pull out of an insurance plan can deal with adverse selection and general taxes can deal with the need to subsidize high-risk individuals —if that is thought to be a legitimate government function.

In the end, Obamacare’s rickety economic structure is intimately connected to its constitutional infirmities. The simple fixes that control the worst excesses of the ACA obviate the need for the government’s constitutional adventurism.

If SCOTUS strikes the mandate down I believe it will provide momentum to repeal it. At least I hope it does.

Click here to view the embedded video.

UPDATE

Click here to view the embedded video.

Leftists and conservatives will all argue that they support the freedom to live their lives as they choose. Like anything else in life, the devil is in the details and when you probe further you find a fundamental difference in what is defined as freedom. In a recent blog post discussing the difference between the Tea Party movement versus Occupy Wall Street, Flopping Aces’ guest writer johngalt gave an excellent summary:

“I believe that the two differing groups have vastly different ideas on how freedom and liberty are achieved, and, in essence, who has the responsibility for making a person’s freedom and liberty a reality.”

(Addressing the demands of the OWS) “These “demands” all have one thing in common. That is, the removal of responsibility to individuals over their own lives. Even the requests for spending money on “ecological restoration” removes their own responsibility over the environment they can affect, dumping it on someone else. To put it quite simply, in order to attain what the OWS movement sees as freedom and liberty, their demands only “liberate” themselves from personal responsibility.”

And after summing up core Tea Party principles – “The TEA party groups universally espouse Personal Responsibility over one’s own life. Which means, that when a TEA party member starts to talk about freedom and liberty, they are not talking about imposing upon another person to provide for that freedom and liberty, but rather, that each person take their own responsibility over their lives.”

That sums up the philosophies nicely, and I can break it down into even simpler terms. If an act involves the freedom to insert something into your body or somebody else’s for pleasure, the leftist will choose the option that offers greater freedom. Freedoms that entail responsibility for one’s actions will fall onto the side of the conservative.

There is one exception I can see to this that does not fall squarely into either camp, and I want to briefly examine it before we go any further. I am, of course, talking about gay marriage. On the surface, this looks like a no brainer that conservatives seek to restrict the freedom of consenting adults. When you dig deeper though, there is more to it. A good portion of conservatives (including your author) actually favor civil unions (43% conservative GOP, 59% Mod/Lib GOP, 54% Cons/Mod Dems). It is ridiculous that two consenting adults who love each other shouldn’t be able to enjoy all of the legal benefits that their hetero counterparts do simply because their brains are wired to be attracted to the same gender. Where the line gets drawn is with marriage because marriage itself has a deep meaning within their religion. If you think that sex is no different than race look no further than my analogy regarding gays in the military. The other issue that conservatives have is that it also leads to the state using it to impose its will on its citizens. It’s not homophobic to think that Kindergarten is too young to start teaching children about sex or that forcing the church out of the adoption business is a good idea. This topic warrants its own post, but I needed to discuss it before going any further.

Back to the original point, what are the topics where the leftists will favor greater personal freedom over the right? Simply put, any involving sex, drugs, or alcohol. This is not to say that granting such individual freedoms would be a bad thing. Reforming our drug laws will get quite a few people out of prison and reduce a slew of law enforcement costs, not to mention allowing society to focus treatment on addicts rather than punishment. Are there negative sides to this? Absolutely. The same with sex – there is no reason why the government should interfere in personal relationships provided they do not cause harm to others. Unfortunately, the left never knows when to stop, and suddenly it is a right to have someone else pay for your contraceptives, morning after abortifacients and sterilization services. What the left fails to realize is that having access to something does not constitute the right to have it paid for by someone else. Again, conservatives will for the most part support a woman’s right to access to these services, but draw the line when suddenly the First Amendment to the Constitution is trumped by your need for pleasure. And there are also legitimate medical reasons for these services – some women take the pill to help fight conditions they may have or may need a hysterectomy, and few conservatives will oppose these. They just don’t want to be forced to pay for your weekend romp.

Now look at the other side, and where conservatives desire freedom. Theirs are the ones that our president laments as “negative freedoms:”

• Freedom to defend yourself and your family
• Freedom to not have the state impose on your religious beliefs
• Freedom to choose where your children go to school
• Freedom to decide how your retirement is funded
• Freedom to make the choices over your personal health care

In each one of these the conservative seeks freedom from the state to make choices over the major decisions over their lives, where those of the left focus on their pursuit of pleasure. One wants the freedom to live and grow and take responsibility for one’s life, where the other only looks at short term happiness. Also ironic that for all that leftists claim to love freedom, in each of the bullet points above the leftist happily surrenders his freedom to the state in return for absolution from responsibility for his actions. The conservative freedoms also come with great responsibility, and they not only willingly accept them, but vehemently fight for the freedom to fail.

The leftists can argue that each of those negative freedoms cuts both ways:

• Gun control will protect you and your family from gun-wielding criminals
• The church has no business being granted any kind of exemption from laws of the land that the rest of the citizens live under.
• What is to stop people from using vouchers to send their children to poorly run schools, or to use the extreme example, a school whose teachings are based on White Supremacy?
• What happens to the person who put their entire 401(k) into Enron stock?
• What recourse does a citizen have against an insurance company that rejects their expensive health care claim or they exceed their cap and are forced into bankruptcy over a medical condition?

These are valid questions, and any one of them is worthy of its own post debating the various arguments. But back to my main point, in each of the leftist arguments you are entrusting the state to make the best decision over your life in dealing with these issues. Each one of these issues can be answered with individual freedom and free markets. At the end of the day, it comes down to one simple question: Who do you most trust to make the most important decisions over your life – you, or the state? I know where I stand – where do you?

Crossposted from Brother Bobs Blog