If Oil Companies Did This...

So the President wants two years of "free" college, eh? Boy, didn't see that one coming. Of course, nothing's "free," the cost is only transferred to someone else. In the old days, we used to call that theft. Today, it's called 'compassion,' albeit with someone else's money.

Understand--this was inevitable. The administration has already saddled the taxpayer with $1.1 trillion in student loan debt, accumulated by a generation of ill-advised consumers who still think a four-year liberal arts degree is the pathway to success. Would that it were true. Indeed, research from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity found that nearly half of the nation’s recent college graduates work in jobs that don’t require a degree. Meanwhile, the cost of the ubiquitous social science major has gone up faster than almost anything in the consumer price index--including health care and energy.

Imagine what would happen if instead of hiking productivity and lowering prices, big oil had gouged customers the way higher education has over the last few decades. The fact is education in America today is a government monopoly run solely for the benefit of the Democratic Party's most influential special interest lobby. That's why administrators aren't called to account for the rising cost of a product that seems to have less value every year. The Obama administration promises to 'rate' colleges and universities, but that of course means that higher education will conform even more to the 'politically correct' agenda which has already given us such rigorous coursework as the 'U's' "Sociological Perspectives on Race, Class & Gender." Beats hell out of petroleum engineering.

The only way out of this mess, as with health care, is to stop subsidizing it. Federal Pell grants, which unlike student loans don't have to be repaid, are now closing in on $40 billion per year. Remove the third party subsidy and consumers will demand the best bang for the buck--which in this case would probably result in more plumbers, auto mechanics, and machinists and a lot fewer bartenders with degrees in social work. And so it goes.

SOTU

President Obama's defiant State of the Union speech was classic Democratic strategy: never retreat, never compromise, and never give the opposing side the chance to claim victory. The fact is, for all the media nonsense about working together, nothing of real substance will get done because the President doesn't WANT to work with Republicans. You can't issue four veto threats, call for more tax increases after the voters repudiated them, and then pretend to 'reach across the isle.' What a joke.

No, Mr. Obama and his fellow Democrats want gridlock so they can continue to blame the GOP.

That's why the President told so many whoppers in the speech. When you declare something so that isn't, you know one thing: other folks won't agree with you. For example, the idea that the last decade has seen the warmest temperatures is statistically suspect and has been debunked by satelitte readings (see previous post below). The claim that women can legally receive unequal pay for equal work has been an out and out falsehood since 1963.

But the biggest lie that Democrats have been exploiting for years, and the one Obama predictably went back to as well, is the notion of the rich not paying their fair share. Doesn't matter whether it's the Tax Policy Center, the IRS, or the CBO, the data are clear and have been for decades: the wealthy pay a disproportionate amount of all taxes collected. The WSJ chart below highlights income quintiles (top 20%, bottom 20%, etc.) and what each pay in total federal taxes. Even it's front loaded, but if you look at just income taxes, well...then the top 1% pay nearly 40% of taxes collected and the bottom 47% (remember Mitt Romney?) pay nothing. Hmm..is that fair?

Of course, none of this explains why median incomes have fallen or why income inequality has widened during the Obama presidency. All it points out is that it's not due to tax policy. But if you're really looking to sock it to the fortunate few, the answer is not to regulate or tax them--it is to quit subsidizing them. Eliminate corporate bailouts, esp. on Wall Street; end renewable energy subsidies and, yes, farm programs for the well-to-do; stop the export-import bank from being reauthorized and say 'no' to Pentagon bloat and to publicly funded stadiums for billionaire owners. Finally, tell the Fed to let the cost of money for big banks rise to market levels so middle class savers can get a decent return on their savings.

Oops...just one problem. These are all polices supported by those very same Democratic politicians denouncing the top 1%. Well, isn't that 'rich.'

Seth Borenstein, Climate Hack

>With yet another chicken little call from NASA/NOAA (your tax dollars at work) on global warming, who better to carry the water for the government than Seth Borenstein. Oh yes, chances are you've already come across his breathless AP report on the annual proclamation that the preceding year was the warmest (http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150116/us-sci--hottest_year-b64ea00652.html).

Of course, no one knows what year was the warmest, coolest, or any damn thing in between. To suggest otherwise is to a) presume that the climate never changes or there is such a thing as a 'normal' temperature for the planet and b) to politicize science--which is exactly what Mr. Borenstein has been doing for years. Now I know a little about the tendentious scribe having suffered through his blatant propaganda when he was at Knight-Ridder writing for its local paper here in St. Paul, MN--a city still in search for a global warming problem.

In his latest AP piece he derides those 'non-scientists' who point out the inconvenient truth that satellite temperatures definitely do NOT show recent warming of the earth. Well that's rich, considering 'ol Seth's climate credentials amount to a BS in Journalism. Of course, there indeed are numerous scientists who question climate 'models which obviously cannot distinguish between man-made contributions and natural trends--including CO2 concentrations (see chart below).

Rajesh Agnihotri, senior scientist at National Physics Laboratory said, "Natural forces, like solar intensity appear to be dominating (India's) monsoons to a greater extent than man-made climate changes..." Even Research Director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and a Professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, Phil Jones, recently admitted the that "for the past 15 years there has been no 'statistically significant' warming."

Alas, Mr. Borenstein appears far too close to the well-heeled monied interests in the climate change industry (from grant recipients to renewable energy suppliers) to ever report as a true professional should. He is merely paid to regurgitate their press releases--and so is the AP.

Irreconcilable Differences

The brutal terrorism in Paris demands more than the usual (and quite predictable) outrage from politicians and commentators who will never be called to sacrifice much in the eternal battle for freedom. Mass rallies and a stiff upper lip are fine, but the fact is the terrorists are willing to die for their religious fervor. The question for everyone else is: are you?

No amount of ‘indignation’ or demonstrations of ‘solidarity’ will change the perception among Islamists that the West is out to destroy them. Right or wrong, adherents believe that the invasion of Iraq, Libya & Syria are merely the latest manifestation of colonization by foreign powers. No amount of reason will change their view that the collateral damage from the Obama administration's drone strikes is no different than what they have perpetrated upon innocents in New York or Paris.

So we are really left with two choices: to combine international forces, as Obama plans to do in an upcoming “Global Security Summit” (NSA? You ain’t seen nothing yet..), and declare a global war or to simply acknowledge the carnage in France makes clear that while multiculturalism doesn’t work within nations, it might between them.

That is, Homeland Security ought to be just that. Preserving the peace here in the United States and jettisoning once and for all the failed Wilsonian notion of ‘making the world safe for democracy.’ It means putting troops on OUR borders, not Iraq’s or that ‘graveyard of empires,’ Afghanistan's. It means NOT taking sides in religious conflicts where there is quite clearly no exit strategy from expending American blood and treasure.

It’s more than a bit ironic to witness the 'Golden Globe liberals' who've imposed college speech codes or banned “The Bell Curve” on campus marching for freedom of thought. What was it their hero, NASA’s global warming guru, James Hansen said of the climate change deniers? Oh yes, hold them institutionally 'accountable’ for their ideas. The fact is most American newspapers already refuse to publish material (including cartoons) that is “needlessly offensive,” according to the Washington Post. Yet no amount of self-censorship will extricate America from the religious war it has entered between Jew and Arab, or for that matter, between Islamic factions. Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the putative leader of the Shi’ite Muslim group Hezbollah (which the U.S. has designated a terrorist group), accused the Parisian perpetrators of insulting Islam more than “even those who have attacked the messenger of God through books…or drawing cartoons of the Prophet.”

The inconvenient truth is that outside intervention in Syria has indeed prevented the Shi’a government there (which has spared Christians from attacks, according to the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan) from crushing Sunni radicals such as ISIS.

American devotion to freedom of expression must never wane. But she cannot impose those values abroad. Moreover, the nations of Europe--who find themselves in the cultural crosshairs due to their own misguided polices of open borders--must learn to defend themselves. The reality is as long as the United States intervenes, it will find itself a target of fanatics who are willing to die for a ‘cause,’ however misguided.

The question for American policymakers, as it was a generation ago in SouthEast Asia, can be put succinctly: is it worth it?

Beware the B-Corp.

Minnesota has become the 27th state to establish the fantasy of a corporation without those nasty profits. Yes, you can now register in the land of 10,000 do-gooders as a "public benefit" corporation thereby removing the horror of protecting shareholder value.

Maximizing profits for shareholders has long been the bane of the anti-capitalist left so what better way to undercut free enterprise than to promote the so-called "B-Corp" which is legally allowed to consider "social good" over profits. In a state with some of the richest non-profits already (see MPR, McKnight, Clear Way MN, et al), not to mention some of the most 'politically correct' corporate HQs in the country, you'd think that further funding of such things as "sustainability" initiatives would be overkill.

Of course, the nauseating premise of this scheme to grant corporate liability protections to organizations that spend earnings on liberal fundraising is that the for-profit business is amoral at best and really immoral. How pathetic in this day and age that we have to explain rudimentary economics to the masses, but understand this: the greatest force for social good is the profitable business. And the more profits the better. Why? Because profits increase productivity of workers resulting in wage gains, they pay dividends to Grandma's pension fund, they grow companies when reinvested and add jobs, they provide customers with what they desire, and they encourage competition which drives down prices.

Besides, as the late, great Peter Drucker once said: "There are no such thing as profits, only costs." Translated: profits are to capital what wages are to labor--without the former, you don't have the latter. And without capital and labor, you don't have an economy.

This is only the beginning. You can count on the "public benefit" lobby (and their chief non-profit protagonist B-Lab) to demand favored tax status soon. In the meantime, don't waste your time patronizing or heaven forbid investing in such foolishness.