Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Arthur Radley who wrote (70033)	3/2/2009 9:55:18 PM
From: jlallen	3 Recommendations Respond to of 90947

Palin was forced to pay back taxes because the Alaska DOR reversed a prior determination that the charges she claimed were not taxable......much different than all the tax cheats in the Obama Admin....

To: Arthur Radley who wrote (70033)	3/2/2009 10:00:15 PM
From: mph	4 Recommendations Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 90947

I feel your pain, man! Then you must have failed to go to cash when your man, Obama, was elected. He's been a disaster for the market no matter how you calculate it.....

To: Arthur Radley who wrote (70033)	3/3/2009 3:14:00 AM
From: Sully-	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

The Difference Between Change and Reform By Christopher Chantrill American Thinker Did you notice that when Gov. Sarah Palin was campaigning for vice-president she talked about "reform?" Candidate Obama campaigned on a different theme, "Change We Can Believe In." In case you weren't paying attention, he had the slogan on the emblazoned on the front of his lectern. The word "Change" is a curious one. In politics it is most often used in the context of "Time for a Change." It speaks to the periodic need to throw the rascals out. But in left-speak it means something more. It evokes the need for "social change" or "transformative change." Change in this sense means the secular hope for salvation in this world that the left substitutes for the transcendental hope of religion. Conservatives do not subscribe to the notion of secular salvation. We believe that salvation only comes in the next world. So we don't need to inject transcendental hope into politics. We think in terms of Reform, not Change. Reform is like cleaning and tidying up a living room before a party. You know that in a couple of hours your room will look like a disaster. But you still do it anyway. Change is like a makeover. You imagine that, with a new hairstyle, new clothes, and new makeup you life will change and a different kind of man will address himself to you. It's a good time to start thinking about this as we conservatives watch the change machine at work and yearn instead for good conservative reform, of the kind we might expect from a President Palin or a President Jindal, both of whom already established records as reform governors. But, whatever we do, let's not start the Palin or the Jindal administration in the clueless manner of the Obama administration. We don't yet know what the damage from the Obama administration's zero-for-three first month will be. Nobody can. We won't know until November 2010. But at least Republican candidates now have talking points about Democrats: • The party that talks about ethical government but hires tax cheats; • The party that talks about open government but practices lobbyist-friendly government; • The party that talks about stimulus but enacts "porkulus." Above all the Democratic Party is the party that takes care of its special interests before it steps up to fix the credit system, a party that reverses welfare reform without even a public hearing, a party that criticized a president's defense policies for eight years and then turned around and continued them. If Republicans are not to stumble like the Democrats we have to get our principles straight before we return to political power. It's not enough just to have a reform program. Here are three good ones. • 1. The Hayek principle: The man in Washington cannot know enough to administer the US economy. • 2. The Novak principle: Think of society as three co-equal sectors: economic, political, and moral/cultural. None of the three should dominate the other two, and no two sectors should gang up on the other one. • 3. The Perrow principle: Watch out for "system accidents" in complex close-coupled systems. Readers that know about Hayek and Novak may not know about Charles Perrow. He's the liberal sociologist who wrote Normal Accidents: Living with Hish-Risk Technologies after the Three Mile Island accident. He warned about our love affair with efficiency and complexity. It leads to accidents that can't be controlled. <<< In complex industrial, space, and military systems, the normal accident generally (not always) means that the interactions are not only unexpected, but are incomprehensible for some critical period of time. In part this is because in these human-machine systems the interactions literally cannot be seen. In part it is because, even if they are seen, they are not believed. >>> Does this seem familiar? Forget the dangers of nuclear plants. Today we worry about excessively complex political and financial systems. And right now, it is painfully obvious, we are saddled with a credit system in which any component failure can bring down the whole system. We've seen, in the last month what Change means. It means shoveling taxpayers' money at the Democratic base to bail out the Democratic state and local governments that overspent in the boom, and to bail out Democratic homeowners who bought houses they couldn't afford. The next version of Republican Reform better be different. It needs to start from rock-solid conservative principles. Christopher Chantrill is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. See his roadtothemiddleclass.com and usgovernmentspending.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming. americanthinker.com

To: Arthur Radley who wrote (70033)	3/3/2009 4:46:25 AM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

Budget gimmicks for the faithful Betsy's Page John Dickerson is absolutely right that all presidents play gimmicks with their budget projections. As he points out, George W. Bush's main gimmick was to keep the wars in Iraq off budget. But Obama promised to be different and so it isn't just conservative grouching to ridicule the gimmicks he's using so that he can proclaim that he's bringing the deficit down. <<< Obama claims that he's found $2 trillion in savings over the next 10 years. To achieve some of that savings, he inflates what's known as the baseline—the metric against which the costs of policy changes are measured. Here's an analogy that may help you understand this trick. Let's say that your daughter is about to finish her last year of college, after which she plans to enter a monastery, where she will take a vow of poverty and refuse future parental help. But as you plan your budget for the next decade, you use current-year expenses as your "baseline" and assume that, for the next 10 years, she'll still be in college and you'll still be paying her annual tuition. When she graduates and enters the monastery as planned, you get to pretend that you "saved" the money for the nine years of college tuition you knew she was never going to need. In this manner, the Obama administration pretends that some of the Bush tax cuts are going to affect the budget years after they are set to expire. It also assumes higher Medicare physician payments than projected under current law requirements. The same is true with the accounting for the Iraq war. The baseline assumes the war will be funded at high levels for the next 10 years, even though Obama is planning to bring 100,000 troops home in the next 19 months. >>> Of course, this is basically green eye shade talk that most people won't understand. So the politicians can brag about how they decreased the deficit without actually having cut spending. That's how we can get the fantasy of all the new spending included in Obama's budget on top of hundreds of billions being spent on various bailout plans and still have him get up there before the American people and tell us about how he's going to be cutting the deficit. Now that is gimmickry we can believe in! betsyspage.blogspot.com