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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (5159)	8/15/2003 5:01:48 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793912

Krugman writes column after column predicting depression caused by Bush's policies. But people like Davis are the ones who are really causing damage. You can read the headline, sniff, and pass it by, or you can read about the disaster that the Dems have caused in California by handing the state over to the Unions and the lawyers. First Terminate the Unions Schwarzenegger's Sacramento task ahead. By Rich Lowry National Review If you weren't thrilled by Arnold Schwarzenegger's surprise announcement of his gubernatorial candidacy last week, you either have no heart or work as a lobbyist for a California public-employees union. His jumping into the race was an adrenaline shot for a recall effort that, if successful, will be the most bracing act of political hygiene since Theodore Roosevelt took on the meatpackers. If you were to distill all that is worst about American politics into one man, he would have perfectly combed hair and he would answer to "Gray." A cautious political hack whose only strength is selling out to unions and trial lawyers, Gov. Gray Davis is Bill Clinton without the conscience, Al Gore without the charm. It would be a mistake, however, to overpersonalize his failings. The populist upheaval in California is the result of a chapter in state government that will be compared to the robber-baron era. It is a tale of how unions and trial lawyers can ruin a state's economy with assistance from a very willing governor. Essentially a paid agent of the public-sector unions, Davis has increased the numbers of state employees and their wages and benefits. The $78 billion budget is up about $20 billion during the past four years. As indispensable Sacramento Bee columnist Daniel Weintraub has reported, Davis and the legislature approved, after 45 seconds of debate, a pension giveaway to public employees a few years ago that is now costing the state another $500 million a year. Davis has forced tens of thousands of university employees to pay union dues as part of a push to extend the reach of unionism in all areas. He has done the teachers unions' bidding on nearly everything, working to choke off experimentation with charter schools. He famously asked the union for a $1 million political contribution during a discussion of policy last year. The prison-guards union so tightly controls Davis, it might as well have him in lockup. Some prison guards make as much as $100,000 a year. Last year, even with the state in fiscal meltdown, Davis gave them a 34 percent five-year pay raise, with plenty of other goodies attached, and got a quick $251,000 union contribution in return. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the California firefighters union has devoted major muscle to defeating the recall, which would potentially deprive them of a governor in their back pocket. A Davis-controlled commission, stacked in the union's favor, recently approved a change in the building code that will cost businesses hundreds of millions, but make more jobs for firefighters, plumbers, and pipe-fitters. Right alongside the unions are the trial lawyers. Their favorite boondoggle, out of many, is California's workers' compensation system. Journalist Jill Stewart calls it "the most Byzantine, backward, corrupt and wasteful system in the country." Davis has made it worse. In the past year, workers' comp insurance premiums have increased by 50 percent for some employers. Attorneys for workers' comp applicants made $226 million in fees last year, a $31 million increase from 2001. All this makes for an economic disaster. For business, it means higher taxes, higher insurance premiums, higher legal costs, and higher costs of doing business generally. No wonder the core of California's economy is being gutted. For the past 31 months, manufacturing jobs have been disappearing at a pace of 10,000 a month. If Arnold or anyone else is going to bring them back, he must destroy the union-trial-lawyer complex in Sacramento, Calif. If successful, this effort would be a lesson to the rest of the country. Just as Mayor Rudy Giuliani's reformism in New York City provided a model for urban government across the country, a reform movement in California could usefully demonstrate how an aroused electorate can beat back the economic parasites on its government. Thus the urgency of chasing Gray Davis from Sacramento. If you're an Arnold fan, you can yearn to tell Davis, "Hasta la vista." But a simple "bye-bye" would suffice. nationalreview.com

To: JohnM who wrote (5159)	8/16/2003 7:01:47 AM
From: greenspirit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793912

Then there is this opposing point of view offered by Neil Cavuto. For Krugman the glass is half empty, for Cavuto the glass is half full. Something tells me Krugman is a leftist. :) When good news goes bad Neil Cavuto (archive) August 16, 2003 \| Print \| Send townhall.com If things are so bad, why are the economic numbers lately looking so good? I think it's because they are good, but many of us are convinced they can't possibly stay good. What else could explain the ho-hum reaction to wave after wave of better than expected economic statistics that clearly point to an improving economy? And I'm not talking just some errant number or two. I'm talking a whole slew of them; not in some industries, lately in all industries. Take retail sales. The pessimists say we're not shopping. Apparently they're wrong, because apparently we are. The Commerce Department says such sales climbed 1.4 percent in July from an upwardly revised 0.9 percent advance in June. Now a lot of that was strong auto sales, but even leaving them out of the mix, sales still rose nearly one percent . . . close to double the gain even the optimists were counting on. What could possibly make media and market types ignore good news like that? To hear my friend Greg Hymowitz, who runs his own hedge fund, tell it, the fear it won't last. "There's a good deal of concern about momentum," he tells me. For the life of me, I don't know why, because I see a lot of momentum. I see corporate spending sizzling again. In the latest quarterly report card on the economy, business spending surged a startling 7 percent. Another government report showed growth in the services sector, the strongest since July 1997. Leading economic indicators have advanced three months in a row. Businesses are hiring temporary workers at a staggering rate, nearly 42,000 in July. Generally that's a good precursor to full-time hiring. Gosh, everywhere I look, I see news that was supposed to be bad proving surprisingly good. They said the backup in interest rates would kill the housing boom, then I see housing starts last month surging 3.7 percent. I see inventories that are low that have to be replenished, and workers who are super productive, who have to get help. Where others see a collapsing economy, I see a coiled spring. I didn't just think that. Numbers clearly tell me that; numbers like simple sales reports that show more than simple sales gains at places like Wal-Mart, Kohl's, J.C. Penney, Gap, Best Buy, and on and on. Clearly we're all a little gun-shy with this economy. We've seen technology stocks that looked unbeatable prove very beatable, and new paradigms that more than pooped out. It's understandable to be wary, but it's now bordering on the wacky. Quarterly profits just released handily beat estimates, and most companies gave good guidance for the future . . . not all, but most. It's one thing to be leery about losing money. I argue it can be just as dangerous failing to see the potential of making money. Brave were the souls who dipped into the markets after the October 1987 stock market crash. Then too the experts talked of a likely "multi-year bear market," that would crunch good and bad stocks alike. They were wrong then, of course, but the majority of investors as a result took a conservative course. They missed out until the gains were substantial. Many did all right. But many could have done better. I'm not smart enough to know when the next bull market storms. But I am smart enough to know it doesn't put up a green light. Sometimes, it sends out a lot of little lights . . . little lights that show some light on an economy that's improving and fortunes that could be improving all the more . . . if only we take the time and courage to notice.