Henninger, Lucas and...Parker. This deserves another look...and much thought.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304911104576443953024891120.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t

I have been saying this all along. The fact that Robert Lucas and Dan Henninger agree with me is cold comfort. We are going to become France and your children will have much more leisure time than you ever dreamed of. And also lower income and lower economic opportunity. All my parents ever wanted in life was a better life for their children than they had growing up. They were a total success. That is now ending. Once again consider that in 2008 the average citizen of West Virginia had an income $2000 higher than the average citizen of the European Union. We have met the enemy and now we are he.

One unhappy Frenchman.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703959704575453763961499530.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopBucket

Damn the torpedos, full steam ahead!

This guy is now like Krauthammer...read him and you know what to think.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703339304575240591350076252.html

R.I.P. vibrant U.S. economy. Sloughing toward Helsinki. God help us.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303411604575168492894541142.html

President Obama is trying to take us down the same road...and we reject it!

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704057604575080602346820226.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond

US vs. Europe: some answers.

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2010/01/rise-of-european-leisure.html

You are living history...

I still don't believe we are headed for a major economic train wreck like the 1930s. A big downturn is very possible, but I am not willing to say the "D" word. Instead let me suggest we are going to be like 1933 and 1965. We are looking at major, major changes in the percentage of our GDP that the government consumes. I view what will happen in the next few short years as a race to the French model of macroeconomic structure. The starter's pistol goes off when Democrats have super majorities in both houses of Congress. That is where I see us headed. If that appeals to you, start licking your chops, dinner is almost ready. If that is not something you want, you may want to freshen up a bit, because man you have a wall of pain coming your way. Let me remind any and all that it took 50 years and Ronald Reagan to break the grip the Great Depression had on our economic policy and macroeconomic functioning.

Welcome home LBJ. The following is from the lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal today. Surprise surprise, the editors of the WSJ are more articulate than me. But it is exactly what I have been thinking lately.

From the WSJ:

If the current polls hold, Barack Obama will win the White House on November 4 and Democrats will consolidate their Congressional majorities, probably with a filibuster-proof Senate or very close to it. Without the ability to filibuster, the Senate would become like the House, able to pass whatever the majority wants.

Though we doubt most Americans realize it, this would be one of the most profound political and ideological shifts in U.S. history. Liberals would dominate the entire government in a way they haven't since 1965, or 1933. In other words, the election would mark the restoration of the activist government that fell out of public favor in the 1970s. If the U.S. really is entering a period of unchecked left-wing ascendancy, Americans at least ought to understand what they will be getting, especially with the media cheering it all on.
The nearby table shows the major bills that passed the House this year or last before being stopped by the Senate minority. Keep in mind that the most important power of the filibuster is to shape legislation, not merely to block it. The threat of 41 committed Senators can cause the House to modify its desires even before legislation comes to a vote. Without that restraining power, all of the following have very good chances of becoming law in 2009 or 2010.

- Medicare for all. When HillaryCare cratered in 1994, the Democrats concluded they had overreached, so they carved up the old agenda into smaller incremental steps, such as Schip for children. A strongly Democratic Congress is now likely to lay the final flagstones on the path to government-run health insurance from cradle to grave.
Mr. Obama wants to build a public insurance program, modeled after Medicare and open to everyone of any income. According to the Lewin Group, the gold standard of health policy analysis, the Obama plan would shift between 32 million and 52 million from private coverage to the huge new entitlement. Like Medicare or the Canadian system, this would never be repealed.
The commitments would start slow, so as not to cause immediate alarm. But as U.S. health-care spending flowed into the default government options, taxes would have to rise or services would be rationed, or both. Single payer is the inevitable next step, as Mr. Obama has already said is his ultimate ideal.
- The business climate. "We have some harsh decisions to make," Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned recently, speaking about retribution for the financial panic. Look for a replay of the Pecora hearings of the 1930s, with Henry Waxman, John Conyers and Ed Markey sponsoring ritual hangings to further their agenda to control more of the private economy. The financial industry will get an overhaul in any case, but telecom, biotech and drug makers, among many others, can expect to be investigated and face new, more onerous rules. See the "Issues and Legislation" tab on Mr. Waxman's Web site for a not-so-brief target list.
The danger is that Democrats could cause the economic downturn to last longer than it otherwise will by enacting regulatory overkill like Sarbanes-Oxley. Something more punitive is likely as well, for instance a windfall profits tax on oil, and maybe other industries.
- Union supremacy. One program certain to be given right of way is "card check." Unions have been in decline for decades, now claiming only 7.4% of the private-sector work force, so Big Labor wants to trash the secret-ballot elections that have been in place since the 1930s. The "Employee Free Choice Act" would convert workplaces into union shops merely by gathering signatures from a majority of employees, which means organizers could strongarm those who opposed such a petition.
The bill also imposes a compulsory arbitration regime that results in an automatic two-year union "contract" after 130 days of failed negotiation. The point is to force businesses to recognize a union whether the workers support it or not. This would be the biggest pro-union shift in the balance of labor-management power since the Wagner Act of 1935.
- Taxes. Taxes will rise substantially, the only question being how high. Mr. Obama would raise the top income, dividend and capital-gains rates for "the rich," substantially increasing the cost of new investment in the U.S. More radically, he wants to lift or eliminate the cap on income subject to payroll taxes that fund Medicare and Social Security. This would convert what was meant to be a pension insurance program into an overt income redistribution program. It would also impose a probably unrepealable increase in marginal tax rates, and a permanent shift upward in the federal tax share of GDP.
- The green revolution. A tax-and-regulation scheme in the name of climate change is a top left-wing priority. Cap and trade would hand Congress trillions of dollars in new spending from the auction of carbon credits, which it would use to pick winners and losers in the energy business and across the economy. Huge chunks of GDP and millions of jobs would be at the mercy of Congress and a vast new global-warming bureaucracy. Without the GOP votes to help stage a filibuster, Senators from carbon-intensive states would have less ability to temper coastal liberals who answer to the green elites.
- Free speech and voting rights. A liberal supermajority would move quickly to impose procedural advantages that could cement Democratic rule for years to come. One early effort would be national, election-day voter registration. This is a long-time goal of Acorn and others on the "community organizer" left and would make it far easier to stack the voter rolls. The District of Columbia would also get votes in Congress -- Democratic, naturally.
Felons may also get the right to vote nationwide, while the Fairness Doctrine is likely to be reimposed either by Congress or the Obama FCC. A major goal of the supermajority left would be to shut down talk radio and other voices of political opposition.
- Special-interest potpourri. Look for the watering down of No Child Left Behind testing standards, as a favor to the National Education Association. The tort bar's ship would also come in, including limits on arbitration to settle disputes and watering down the 1995 law limiting strike suits. New causes of legal action would be sprinkled throughout most legislation. The anti-antiterror lobby would be rewarded with the end of Guantanamo and military commissions, which probably means trying terrorists in civilian courts. Google and MoveOn.org would get "net neutrality" rules, subjecting the Internet to intrusive regulation for the first time.

It's always possible that events -- such as a recession -- would temper some of these ambitions. Republicans also feared the worst in 1993 when Democrats ran the entire government, but it didn't turn out that way. On the other hand, Bob Dole then had 43 GOP Senators to support a filibuster, and the entire Democratic Party has since moved sharply to the left. Mr. Obama's agenda is far more liberal than Bill Clinton's was in 1992, and the Southern Democrats who killed Al Gore's BTU tax and modified liberal ambitions are long gone.
In both 1933 and 1965, liberal majorities imposed vast expansions of government that have never been repealed, and the current financial panic may give today's left another pretext to return to those heydays of welfare-state liberalism. Americans voting for "change" should know they may get far more than they ever imagined.

Lke I have said all along...We are going to become France.

Panic in Detroit. Want to know where we are headed? Look to France...or Detroit.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704322004574477363965641226.html

Coming soon to an economy near you.

Michael Boskin gets it right...and it don't mean a thing.


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123629969453946717.html

Charles Krauthammer tells it like it is.

You should not be afraid or have any fear of what is to come. I know the future and will remove all uncertainty. Do the words European Union have any meaning to you? http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/26/AR2009022602908.html?wpisrc=newsletter I remember 60 Minutes did a piece on Denmark a bit back. Morley Safer asked the youth there "if there is one thing you would tell your American counterparts what would it be?" They said "give up on the American dream and let government take care of you." Just listen to the Sex Pistols and "God Save the Queen." Watch especially beginning at 2:37...this is what the nanny state will do to us...Look at Johnny Rotten and his vacant eyes... No future...no future...no future for you. Government has determined your destiny. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeP220xx7Bs Did you see that? Maybe we will all now become hash smoking, alcoholic wards of the state like Johnny...and the Brits and the Dutch. So surrender, dry your eyes, fire up your hash pipe and pay up sucker.

Hey buddy, come here and rub this lamp.

From Senator Obama in 2001: "As radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it has been interpreted -- and Warren Court interpreted it in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can't do to you, says what the federal government can't do to you. But it doesn't say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf."

The negative liberties are contained in the Bill of Rights and are what the government can't do to you like deprive you of free speech or take away your gun to defend yourself and family.

Senator Obama is talking about "positive liberties" not found in the Constitution, a list of things government must do or provide for you. Or let us call them what they are...economic rights. Thus the Senator has said publically that access to health care is an economic right. At least he has the guts to say it, right to your face. That would be first on the list. Second on down the list of new economic rights would be the right to a "living wage" however you may define that term. The third new right may/would be access to free education for as long as an individual wished to attend school. Fourth (insert your favorite right here).

What about the right to live your life without the intrusion of coersive central power?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUOIWdwYy98

Henninger gets it right.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122533132337982833.html

Eric Clapton was not the first one where we are right now...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd60nI4sa9A&feature=related

"Stick 'em up!"

Guy goes walking down the street and another guy comes to him and says "Hey Mister you got a gun?" The guy says "No." So the other guy pulls out a gun, points it at him and says "Well then stick 'em up." This is one of the many jokes Henny Youngman told that I will never forget. Ya know why? Because it is funny. OK, now Senator Obama is going to do the same thing to you. He is telling you to your face except he is gonna do it without a gun. Connect the dots if you will...he tells Joe the plumber he is going to spread the wealth around and also has said that even though low income peeps don't pay many income taxes, they still pay payroll taxes and need relief. Are you there yet? Increase payroll and income taxes on higher income workers, cut payroll taxes on low income workers, and give those who pay no income taxes at all refund checks on things that they never "funded" in the first place. George McGovern talked the same nonsense and won Massachusetts in the election of 1972.

And uncapping Social Security means YOU baby! If you make over $102,000 you are one of the stinking rich low lifes who must be brought to heel. Social Security was never intended to be a welfare program. It was something that was earned from employment history. It already is much more generous to lower income retirees given their contributions than to upper income retirees. And I don't have a problem with that as it stands right now. But a naked wealth grab is all this is, a transformation of Social Security into naked welfare, and the American people don't like it when they have a gun stuck in their face. Except there is no gun here.

Go back to work and pay up sucker!

Now, let the games begin!

Hello...this is the international operator...Paris is calling.

I realize many make several arguments against the bailout that passed this afternoon. I have remained agnostic regarding how it is structured but have insisted on its urgency. Great, now we can start to move on this thing.

What I will never get however is that many of the people who were the most vehemently against it are the same people who would be helped the most. I am talking about the regular guy on Main street. They were riling against it the hardest and it is his job that is going to be saved. It reminds me of the French (lovely little dears that they are). Any time any labor market reform is proposed to free up the labor market, the people who fight the hardest against it are young unemployed kids who would be helped the most. Look, I have lost enough money on horses over the years and got beaten by long shots that there was no way I could possibly have picked to win. Total shockers that leave you mumbling to yourself. I have been around and have lived life and almost nothing surprises me any more. Except what I just said above. And I still don't get it. Maybe next we will see Peta fighting anti-hunting laws?