Want to stay married?

Be very careful about marrying someone with a lot of "experience," according to sources linked by Vox Day.  Go figure; if someone has left a lot of previous lovers, they've established a pattern that they just might continue. 

Technology you can use

Getting frustrated with trying to light the candles on your daughter's birthday cake without burning yourself and spilling a ton of wax/match pieces on the cake?

Try a blowtorch.  It works great--sorry, but pictures did not turn out.

Lard, flour, sugar, fruit, and a touch of salt

Glenn Beck shows us all the difference between sound economics and Keynesian economics in a little discourse about  "the Simpsons" and a most delicious dessert.   Sound economics bakes the pie; Keynesians try to cut it different ways to make things fair, forgetting that the real magic of an economy is when the proprietor realizes that the way to prosperity isn't to demand someone else's finished goods, but to realize that humble ingredients can produce glorious results.

And yes, I think there are some folks near Eagle Butte, SD who need to learn this lesson, as well as masses of Americans who voted to put Nancy Pelosi in the chair of the Speaker of the House.

Why Christians in government matters

My friend Cold Fusion Guy links to a loan offer you don't want to take--apparently, the tribe is going into businesses usually associated wtih the Mob, specifically loan sharking.

Now far be it from me to deny the Lakota an opportunity to make a living, but I have to wonder if--just like other tribes which run casinos--this business is going to cause more trouble than it is worth.  Specifically, what tribal leaders are telling their young people is that prosperity depends on taking advantage of desperate people.

That sounds like a recipe for creating criminals, or at least Democrats, and if you wanted to create a situation where no one would dare to do business in your area, you could hardly do better.

Point of interest; I went to college with a Lakota gentleman from Eagle Butte.  Good guy, but I'm not quite sure we understood each other, though we certainly tried.

How many jobs....

....are at stake with the President's plan (and the Democrats in Congress) to repeal Bush's tax cuts for those earning over $250,000 per year?   Is it relevant that "TurboTax" Tim Geithner says that only 2% of small business owners would be impacted?

Well, let's take a look at this.  There are about 29 million small businesses in the U.S., and our favorite guy who can't figure out Schedule SE would suggest it is "only" 600,000 of them who would be affected.  Along the same lines, it's said that the planned tax hike for the prosperous few would raise about seventy billion dollars per year.

If we then consider that it takes about $40,000 to employ someone (even at the entry level--think benefits), this would indicate that this tax hike for the rich could cost close to two million jobs--if your employer has no money, you have no job.  In the same way, 4% of 250,000 is about $10,000.....a good chunk of a minimum wage worker's job, suggesting about 500,000 could lose their jobs due to this.  Along the same lines, Roosevelt's tax hikes back in 1937 cost millions their jobs as well.

Now of course not every job costs exactly $40k, and government spending can generate jobs as well.  However, reality is that when government spends for things that are not truly "public goods" a la Adam Smith, people are put out of work. 

Maybe it's time to reconsider the populist idea that one's boss is an economic "opponent" a la Marx, and maybe it's time to consider the idea that if the guy who owns the place where you work doesn't have any money, you won't have a job very long.

Thoughts on medicine

First of all, take a look at this article about a Mayo Clinic study which links overwork and stress among young doctors to unprofessional behavior.  For the uninitiated, medical school can easily result in a quarter million dollars of debt, and typical course loads are in the 18-20 hours range--quite heavy when one considers that a great deal of memorization and thinking is needed.  Follow that with long workdays in residency, and you have a great recipe for burnout.   (if you don't respect your doctor for making it through this, you should!)

Now I'm torn on this.  On one level, when I come into the ER with searing pain in my abdomen, or a wound that needs to be closed in minutes, I certainly want my ER physician to respond almost reflexively--painkiller, stitches, whatever.   Long hours and repetition are certainly good for this.  A good ER doctor can almost do stitches in his sleep, and that's a good thing gained from, well, doing stitches and such while dead tired in residency.

On the other hand, when I come in for a routine physical--as I did yesterday--I'm not sure I want a reflexive response, but rather the mental agility to decipher the evidence proferred by a patient and come to a reasonable set of tests and/or therapies for my conditions.

Along those lines, my doctor mentioned that I would be (per standard practice) having my first colonoscopy at the standard time at age 50, and (watching out for myself) I posed the question of whether my mother's death of colon cancer would change this recommendation.  Well, it did, of course--he had reflexively responded to the ordinary charts, but when he considered my personal condition....well....all you guys are going to be so jealous that I'm getting one a little early.   (or not!)

So we have two lessons here; one, it might be wise to modify medical training somewhat to make sure the pressures of medical school don't push out creativity.  Second, if you want to be healthy, you've got to take a certain amount of responsibility for your own care, and even better, it helps to have someone else keeping an eye on your care when you're not able to.  It's not that doctors are incompetent or bad people, but they've got the same limitations that we all do.

Something to look for this election season

A friend of mine at church noted that fetal alcohol syndrome is known for generating people who can lie without remorse, and that even milder exposure than causes fetal alcohol syndrome will tend to do the same.  She said that it can be recognized by changes in the nose and hands--squared hands and a somewhat broader nose.

So now I know what I'm going to look for in a candidate this fall, or rather, what I'm looking to avoid.  I think this just might explain a lot of what happens in DC, St. Paul, and elsewhere.  :^)

Update on "cash for clunkers"

Apparently, the National Bureau for Economic Research has done a study to see how many additional vehicles were bought due to the "cash for clunkers" program. 

Answer:  Zero.  About five billion dollars down the toilet to generate exactly zero jobs for anyone in the auto industry, and 700,000 fewer family cars on the used car market for those who need them.  Just like classical economics and the Austrians would have--and did--tell you.  They also would tell you, and correctly, that the same kind of person who would default on his home mortgage would do the same a second time, and on his new "cash for clunkers" car, and....

H/T SayAnythingBlog.

It could be....it could be....nope

One of the joys of growing up rooting for the Cubs was the voice of Jack Brickhouse watching a ball sail over the outfield saying "It could be....it could be....IT IS".  Well, that was sort of my feeling when I heard that President Obama would be appointing a new economic advisor from the University of Chicago.

University of Chicago?  Home of Milton Friedman and a host of Nobel Prize (OK, Sveriges Riksbank) winners for economics?  Could it possibly be that Dear Leader slipped up and appointed an advocate of free markets and reasonably sound money?  The good news was tempered when....

....I learned that the advisor was not, strictly speaking, from the economics faculty, but was rather a professor in the business school, and was moreover a long term advocate of Obama's particular brand of Keynesianism.

You know, this feels a LOT like looking at the Cubs' win/loss record after the typical "June Swoon"--the string of losses that always happened after a few weeks of day games in the 90 degree heat and 90% humidity all too well known to Chicagoans. 

It could be.....it could be......caught by the Mets center fielder out of the ivy.  Cubs fall to 60-102 for the season.....

I should have known that the chances of a sound economist working for Team Obama were about the same as seeing baseball in October in the friendly confines.

Are the 18% correct?

Count me dubious, but one leader in Pakistan is apparently encouraging our pork-eating, beer-drinking President to offer prayers for Eid at the World Trade Center site and become the world leader of Muslims.  I'm attributing this to more wishful thinking, and perhaps a bit of nuttiness, than to reality, but it's interesting nonetheless.

(and for reference, I'm not one of the 18% who thinks Dear Leader is Muslim, but rather part of the 40% or so who are not sure what he is, but are pretty sure he's neither Christian nor Muslim)

Thoughts on the state of the church today

The church in Florida (or wherever) planning a Koran-burning really ought to consider something; in order to burn one, you must first own one.  To own one--absent an Islamic version of the "Gideons"--you must buy one.  When you buy a Koran, you are enriching those who are promoting Islam.

Promoting Islam is an odd way of working against it.

In church, we are encouraged to taste and see that the Lord is good--and then at the Lord's Supper, we too often get cardboard-like "communion wafers" which do not resemble the unleavened flatbread Jesus used at all.  If we wonder why churches often do so badly at catechizing their members and discipling new believers, could it be in part because the way we run ministries does not engage the senses in the way the Scriptures suggest we ought to?    It's a rare person who can appreciate the goodness of the Lord merely from the preaching of the Word, especially if the speaker has no sense of how to speak and a wooden delivery.  One does not need to subscribe to the doctrine of transsubstantiation (I sure don't) or desire a theatrical performance to understand that worship, and the Christian life, ought to involve all five senses.

Obama: "Let's shift where we do business"

....might as well be the title of the provisions in his proposed "tax cuts" which would give a 100% tax credit when businesses invest in new plants or equipment.  Why so?

Possible correction: the AP article I read about this this morning suggested that it was not a tax credit, as the Fox article suggests, but rather an accelerated depreciation schedule.  Either way, it's a powerful incentive to shut down aging plants and flip the bird at unionized workforces and high tax states that voted for Obama.

Think about it a minute; more or less, Obama is telling any moderately profitable company with aging facilities that the cost of moving to an improved facility will be zero.  It's "cash for clunkers" once again--let's PAY people to get rid of useful assets, and then we'll wonder why thousands of towns and cities are devastated when the old facilities close.

On the bright side, the plan would seem to administer a well-earned kick in the teeth to unions in high tax states.  After all, if I ran a unionized company in a high tax (blue, Obama voter) state, and the government offered to pay 100% of the cost for me to relocate to a low tax, non-unionized state like Tennessee, Alabama, South Dakota, or Texas, I'd be all over that in a heartbeat.

Who knew that Obama would throw unions under the bus?  And who knew that Obama would be working to crush businesses in the high tax states that voted for him?

Well, for starters, his grandmother and "spiritual mentor," who are also below that bus, could tell you that, couldn't they?

Interesting thoughts on 2010 vs. 1937

John Lott puts together a very fair-minded piece about the question of what factors were most "effective" at pushing the nonfarm unemployment rate from 14% to about 19-20% in 1938: was it, as Paul Krugman would assert, a lack of federal spending?  Was it, as Newt Gingrich asserts, the confiscatory income taxes Roosevelt levied?  Or, was it, as Lott asserts, significantly the result of the implementation of the Social Security tax and new bank regulations which effectively confiscated large portions of bank reserves?  Lott follows up with a poll of forecasting economists, who suggested that government needs to get out of the way.

The column, and its links, are worth a read.  My take--I'm sure to no one's surprise--is to simply ask whether government can manage something this big--the problem of a lack of knowledge.  Even if you could trust government types to perform ROI analysis in the same way that a business would, they simply would not see the opportunities that entrepreneurs, nor would they have the same incentive to make it work correctly.  They simply don't have the knowledge, nor do they have skin in the game.

Hence, my take is that Gingrich and Lott have it right; Roosevelt's (and earlier, Hoover's) interventionism created, and sustained, the Great Depression until Hitler and Hirohito removed the excuses for that intervention.  Hopefully President Obama gets better economic advisers than those he's had, and soon.

Bourgeoisie of the World Unite!

Stomp the proletarian pig under your heel? 

Well, maybe not, as that would technically be me, but some fun ponderings on the nature of today's opposition to President Obama.  It has always puzzled me how the "Revolution of the proletariat" seems to be instigated by the "intelligentsia" and implemented by an army--and always to the detriment of the working man.

Maybe there's hope after all that the "proletariat" will figure out that government taking money from their employers doesn't help them find work.  Maybe.

...and this guy wants to help manage a multibillion dollar budget

A local DFL (Democratic for you non-Minnesotans) candidate for state Senate recently sent out a campaign flier that explained how he, as a lawyer working as a public defender, knew what it was like to have the end of the paycheck arrive before the end of the month, and use credit cards to make up the difference.

In other words, the guy is saying that he could not make ends meet on a lawyer's salary, and he's decided to patch things up in the stupidest possible way save going to payday loan company.  Yes, law school is not cheap.  Yes, public defenders aren't richly paid.  Even so, if this well paid gentleman thinks that borrowing money at 24% interest is a good way to make ends meet, I don't want him anywhere near the state budgeting process.

If he'd said "I know what it is to manage a tight budget in a tight economy without going into debt, and I'd like to apply what I've learned to the state budgeting process.", then I might be a bit more willing to listen to him.  I have to suggest (again) that one big reason for our current debt malaise at the state and federal level is that too many politicians--Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, Norm Coleman, Byron Dorgan, and a host of others come to mind--simply have never learned to live within their means.  As such, it never occurs to them that state or federal government ought to do the same.

And, again, it also ought to be noted that when someone needs (Dodd, Dorgan, Conrad, Obama, Biden) to get sweetheart deals from loan companies to maintain their lifestyle, they're also pretty likely to listen a little more closely when a lobbyist "suggests" something.   If you wonder why (Barney Frank, Dorgan, Pomeroy, etc..) those banks and other large companies get such sweetheart deals from Congress, there you go.