Archive for 2012

WHY YOU SHOULD work more.

HOPEY-CHANGEY, here’s an updated version of that deficit chart, showing how absurd it is to blame today’s huge national debt on George W. Bush’s spending on Iraq and Afghanistan.

And then there’s this graphic, from The Looking Spoon:

ANOTHER OBAMACARE LOOPHOLE:  A former insurance executive has sounded the alarm about how small businesses are likely to avoid the expensive burdens of Obamacare:  self-insurance.  This is when an employer offers a policy to employees, administered by a traditional insurance company, but the employer bears the risk of loss (costs exceeding premiums) itself.  And the kicker is that self-insured plans generally buy “reinsurance” (aka, “stop loss” insurance) that kicks in when losses exceed a certain level.

Most large employers are presently self-insured (to get out from under expensive state health insurance mandates), but until recently, self-insurance was relatively rare for small employers because of the inherent risk involved.

Ah, sweet loopholes!

EPIC MSM WEB DESIGN FAIL? “One intriguing thing that happened while I was out of touch with humanity for a week was that three mainstream news sites completely changed their format.  Much for the worse, I might add.  They essentially stopped being ‘news sites’ by conventional definition.”

ELECTION NIGHT LIGHTS: Buzz Bissinger of Friday Night Lights Fame Endorses … Mitt Romney? And note this: “I found it striking that the 47 percent message — something that is supposed to be so devastating for Romney — plays a part in a member of the cultural elite turning from Obama.”

TIGERHAWK: In which I explain why “you didn’t build that” so offended business people.

The very argument is disingenuous. Neither mainstream Republicans nor the Tea Party activists who drove the 2010 election are against public roads, public education, police departments, firefighters (Warren) or, even, technology spin-offs from necessary spending on national defense (Obama, re the Internet). There has been a broad national consensus around each of these for between 100 and 200 years (I am sure we all remember that Eli Whitney’s invention of interchangeable parts was in the context of defense spending). To suggest otherwise is to erect and demolish a straw man — an argument your adversary never made — the last and worst tactic of a lawyer with a losing case. As any good law professor knows…

Heck, forget good law professors. Even Obama and Elizabeth Warren know it. Plus this:

Beyond the roads, cops, honest courts, and firefighters, government is an obstacle to entrepreneurs, not the helpful partner that Warren and Obama imply. Liberals, and especially President Obama, think that “business” is best represented by the Fortune 100 and its “chieftains”. Most people who “built that” know otherwise, that government serves to entrench huge bureaucratic businesses at the expense of the upstarts that actually create new jobs. First, there are now so many regulations associated with being a “government contractor” that few small businesses can feast at the taxpayer’s trough even if they had the political stroke to get the contract in the first place. Second, the ever larger pile of federal, state, and local regulation favors the large over the small, the mature business over the growing.

Indeed. And this:

Of course, the most frustrating aspect of all of this to business people is that these points seem so obvious as to be self-evident, so when the chattering classes do not recognize them as such we distrust their motives and assume they are all a bunch of cynical parlor pinks. Increasingly, though, I believe that there are a great many people, especially in the educated elites, who are profoundly disconnected with the reality of commerce, and actually have very little idea how small and growing businesses struggle to create the wealth that we all need to support our prosperity. That is to America’s great misfortune.

It certainly is.

CHINA’S COMMUNISTS UNDER FIRE for not being communist enough. It’s a fair cop. But then, the more people talk about equality, the more you wind up with a well-heeled oligarchy.

UH OH: Saudi boy with Sars-like virus in Hong Kong’s hospital. “A four-year-old boy visiting Hong Kong from Saudi Arabia is ill in Queen Mary Hospital with a Sars-like virus suspected to be the same kind that emerged in the Middle East last month. If confirmed, it would be the world’s third case of the new coronavirus, which killed one man and left the other critically ill, Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post reported on Monday.”

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VIDEO: BYE-BYE ‘OBAMA GIRL,’ HELLO PAUL RYAN GIRL!

CAMILLE PAGLIA ON CAPITALISM AND ART: “Thus we live in a strange and contradictory culture, where the most talented college students are ideologically indoctrinated with contempt for the economic system that made their freedom, comforts and privileges possible. In the realm of arts and letters, religion is dismissed as reactionary and unhip. The spiritual language even of major abstract artists like Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko is ignored or suppressed.”