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Archive for 2016
May 2, 2016
DENNIS PRAGER ASKS AND ANSWERS THE BIG QUESTION: Why is the Left hostile to Western civilization?
HERE’S WHY GOVERNMENT HOUSING VOUCHERS CAUSE MORE POVERTY, NOT LESS: Question – Which program does the federal government spend more on each year, public housing vouchers or welfare checks? If you said the former, you must know the Manhattan Institute’s Howard Husock. What he knows about public housing is more valuable than the work of the 10 smartest people on the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s bloated payroll.
“Its incentives are completely skewed,” Husock, vice president for policy research and director of the Social Entrepreneurship Initiative at Manhattan, told The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Katie Watson.
“You’ve ‘hit the lottery’ and you’re set for life. Not only do you hit the lottery and you can sit back and have a housing unit for life, but, remember, your deal is you pay 30 percent of your income in rent, but what it means is for every additional dollar you earn, you pay an addition 30 cents in rent,” he said.
The voucher concept is grounded in common sense, but it somehow got corrupted when HUD applied it to the public housing arena. Husock explains in straightforward terms why the way HUD does vouchers ends up encouraging the very traits most likely to produce poverty in an individual’s life.
BAILOUTS ARE UNPOPULAR BECAUSE THEY REWARD PROFLIGACY AND TEND TO WIND UP IN THE HANDS OF POLITICAL CRONIES: Puerto Rico debt rescue plan engulfed in Great Recession ‘bailout’ politics.
COMING OUT FROM ILYA SOMIN: Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter, Second Edition.
BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT LEFTIST PURITANS DO: Why is the government out to destroy vaping?
Related: Even as it effectively decriminalized marijuana, California launched “a progressive jihad against ‘vaping,’ the use of so-called e-cigarettes that deliver nicotine in the form of vapor. . . . If that seems inconsistent to you, you are thinking about it the wrong way: For all of its scientific pretensions and empirical posturing, progressivism is not about evidence, and at its heart it is not even about public policy at all: It is about aesthetics. The goal of progressivism is not to make the world rational; it’s to make the world Portland.”
AFTER SPENDING NEARLY A CENTURY TRYING TO END THE “DICTATORSHIP OF THE MIDDLE CLASS,” YOU’D THINK OUR BETTERS WOULD HAVE GIVEN THE MATTER SOME THOUGHT: Is the U.S. Ready for Post-Middle-Class Politics? “The upper middle class are surprised by the rise of Trump. The actual middle class are surprised we’re surprised.”
Related: Trump vs. The New Class.
Plus: The Coming Middle Class Anarchy.
Supplementary Reading: The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class.
ALSO THE OBAMACARE DEBACLE, THE LIBYA DISASTER, CHINA, RUSSIA, ETC. Obama report card: Lousy economy, Syria plague legacy.
ONE REGULATION IS PAINLESS. A MILLION OF THEM HURT: “‘In one year,’ wrote Warren Meyer in 2015, ‘I literally spent more personal time on compliance with a single regulatory issue — implementing increasingly detailed and draconian procedures so I could prove to the State of California that my employees were not working over their 30-minute lunch breaks — than I did thinking about expanding the business or getting new contracts.’”
Related: In Seattle, a minor victory in the left’s war of hyper-regulation: the trash man can’t poke around in your trash anymore.
STANDING UP AGAINST RACISM AND BIGOTRY Now THAT’S a tip: Twitter raises R13‚000 for RMF waitress:
Donations received from as far afield as England‚ Canada and Germany swelled a fund for the waitress to R13‚381 by 11am on Saturday‚ according to Roman Cabanac of Johannesburg‚ one of the three men behind the Twitter campaign.
The first gift – R50 – came from Sihle Ngobese‚ the spokesman for Western Cape social development MEC Albert Fritz‚ who went to the ObzCafe after work on Friday to find the waitress.
She had been reduced to tears by Ntokozo Qwabe‚ an RMF leader at Oxford University‚ who then posted a Facebook rant about what he and fellow activist Wandile Dlamini had done.
He wrote: “We are out at ObzCafe … and the time for the bill comes. Our waitress is a white woman. I ask … what the going rate for tips/gratuity is in these shores. They look at me very reluctantly and they say ‘give me the slip‚ I’ll sort that out’. I give them the slip.
“They take a pen & slip in a note where the gratuity/tip amount is supposed to be entered. The note reads in bold: “WE WILL GIVE TIP WHEN YOU RETURN THE LAND”. The waitress comes to us with a card machine for the bill to be sorted out. She sees the note & starts shaking. She leaves us & bursts into typical white tears (like why are you crying when all we’ve done is make a kind request? lol!).”
Ngobese told TimesLive on Saturday that he found Qwabe’s post “insulting‚ racist and disgraceful” and felt the least he could do was to give the waitress the tip she had been denied. He posted a photograph on Twitter of his receipt for R50‚ with the handwritten words “And the kindness is free. F*** RMF!”
“Qwabe misses the complete irony of what he did‚” Ngobese told TimesLive. “If you want to talk about privilege‚ being a master’s graduate from Oxford and lording it over a minimum-wage waitress is the height of irony. It speaks to the disdain I have for RMF’s claims to being a voice for the downtrodden.”
Well, that’s Social-Justice-Warriorism in a nutshell, isn’t it?
CALIFORNIANS CAN BUILD THEIR WAY OUT OF THE HOUSING SHORTAGE.
In the ultimate NIMBY region, good luck with that. As City Journal dubbed San Francisco in February “The Status Quo City — Celebrated for its openness, San Francisco has a hard time with change,” and equally wealthy (and leftist) areas of the Bay Area such as Palo Alto also love using their legislative clout to stand athwart history just as much.
YES, BUT TALKING ABOUT IT RAISES UNCOMFORTABLE QUESTIONS ABOUT OUR OWN GOVERNANCE: We ignore Venezuela’s imminent implosion at our peril.
THE ROAD TO SERFDOM, IN CARTOONS.
This was originally a pamphlet that was distributed immediately after WWII by General Motors, of all people. If only GM had paid attention to its own advice, it never would have transmogrified into first “a health-care provider that makes cars as an industrial by-product,” and then — unexpectedly! — Government Motors. But as Conquest’s Second Law of Politics warns, “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.”
(Via Insta-reader Dev Woolwine.)
SHOT: Trump: ‘We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country’
“We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country, and that’s what they’re doing,” Trump said during his second rally Sunday in Fort Wayne, Indiana, referring to China’s high number of exports relative to the U.S.
Trump has repeatedly accused China of manipulating its currency to make its exports more competitive on the global market and has claimed that China is “killing” the U.S. on trade.
CHASER: China, Trying to Bolster Currency, Taps Foreign Reserves.
Beijing has spent perhaps a trillion dollars since last year to keep the yuan strong as investors flee the country, and as the Chinese leadership pushes for the IMF to crown the yuan as a reserve currency later this year.
HANGOVER: Yuan drops against basket even as policy makers talk stability.
China’s central bank faces a delicate balancing act with the yuan. While weakening the currency bolsters economic growth by making exporters more competitive, declines in the exchange rate could also exacerbate capital flight and erode consumer confidence. More than $900 billion left China in 2015 as the yuan dropped 4.4 percent against the dollar, the biggest annual slide since 1994.
Central planning rarely works as advertised.
EXHIBITIONS: THE PROVOCATIVE ART SHOW: “Coordinated by Provocative Art 2016, this exhibit brought together renowned artists from across the country, including Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Michael Ramirez, National Review cover artist Roman Genn, and controversial guerilla public artist Sabo. As organizer Melissa Dawdy states, ‘…what provokes interest today is artwork that that expresses freedom within the context of Western Civilization. Artists are planting a flag in the sand, saying ‘Art is not about conforming to a political view.’”
I’M NOT SURE WHAT THE CORPORATE HIERARCHY IS ON THIS, but Comcast spokesman Al Sharpton does not approve of Viacom spokesman Larry Wilmore’s use of the N-word during Sunday’s White House Correpsondents’ dinner, the L.A. Times reports:
Larry Wilmore’s use of the N-word to President Obama at end of his White House Correpsondents’ dinner performance received the stamp of disapproval from the Rev. Al Sharpton.
“Many of us are against using the N-word period,” Sharpton said at MSNBC’s after party that followed the event at the Washington Hilton. “But to say that to the President of the United States in front of the top people in media was at best in poor taste.”
Left out of the L.A. Times article? Language that Comcast spokesman Al Sharpton deems acceptable in public events; Sharpton himself called then-New York Mayor David Dinkins the N-word in 1992.
TRUMP JR. TO PJM: Denying Trump Nomination Would ‘Destroy’ GOP.
BERNIE SANDERS’ WIFE: It would be nice if FBI moved along Hillary Clinton email probe.
CHANGE: The Uberization of Banking.
Once inside SoFi’s modern, open-floor-plan headquarters, I meet the CEO, chairman and co-founder, Mike Cagney, sitting at a table in a gray company T-shirt and jeans. The 45-year-old native Californian speaks in a deep, deliberate voice, with an undercurrent of confidence and excitement. What’s he so confident and excited about? Doing to banks, with a smartphone-based model, what Amazon has done to book stores and Uber has done to taxi fleets. “There is going to be a seismic redistribution of market cap in the banking world,” he says. “They won’t see it coming until it’s done.”
Much of America wasn’t sure what it was seeing when SoFi aired a dreamy “Great loans for great people” Super Bowl ad this year. But the high-profile TV spot, in the telecast’s tradition, stuck a flag in the ground for a young company with big dreams.
There might also be a market for a Chapter 11 app for people who abuse SoFi.
‘EXPLAINS GRIM MOOD IN CRUZ CAMP’: New poll has Trump up 15% in Indiana.
SO THEY REALLY HAVEN’T LEARNED THEIR LESSON YET: Mizzou Race Relations Committee Releases Series of Anti-Racism Videos for ‘White People.’
TED CRUZ CALLS OUT CHUCK TODD, DNC-MSM FOR TRUMP BIAS ON MEET THE PRESS:
“The media created this Trump phenomenon and then they don’t hold him accountable,” Cruz continued, “Now, I’m sure the media planned to do so if he’s the nominee in general election. Suddenly you’ll hear every day about Donald Trump’s tax returns.”
Many on the right speculate that is what the liberal media has planned for Trump. Citing how the media played nice with John McCain in ‘08 and Mitt Romney in ’12, but then took the gloves off after the Republican National Convention. Although Todd may not like it, Cruz is right to point out that the media does have a bias for Trump. He drives up their ratings and they think Hillary can beat him. What’s not to like about him for the media?
And note this:
Cruz pointed out that even though the networks stand to make millions of dollars from more GOP debates they don’t call for any more of them. He argued that the media doesn’t want more because that would mean Trump would have to answer hard questions about the foreign policy speech he had recently given. “They are giving up millions of dollars and the reason is, your network’s executives are partisan Democrats,” just looking to help their party in the general election. “You don’t get to just say that! Wait a minute, you don’t get to just say that,” shouted Todd before quickly backing down, “It’s not true but go ahead.”
As Erick Erickson wrote in 2013, “Let’s use this as a timely reminder that Chuck Todd was once a Democratic staffer to Senator Tom Harkin and is married to Kristian Denny Todd who served as a communications person for the Democratic Party and then helped found Maverick Strategies and Mail, a consulting group for liberal candidates.”
JOEL KOTKIN: Hillary As Stalin to Obama’s Lenin.