Are American Women Only Interested in Contraception and Abortion Access?

If you listen to Democrat campaign messages aimed at the female vote, you would think so. But…it is not true. Women are interested in a variety of campaign issues. Look at the following from a group called “Independent Women’s Voice,” and educational advocacy group.

This women’s organization has taken a great interest in educating American women on the truth about the Affordable Care Act, AKA Obamacare. The group contacted women in 24,000 households in America who are considered independent voters. They presented them with information from the Congressional Budget Office. The name of neither Presidential candidate was included in their mailing—only facts from the CBO regarding the ACA. The mailings were followed up with a questionnaire about which presidential candidate they favored. (Presidential candidate preference is considered to be a proxy for approval/disapproval of the candidates: Mr. Romney known to favor repeal of the ACA and Mr. Obama who favors implementing the law.)

In a control group who never received the mailings, independent women voters favored Mr. Romney in the presidential race by a 44%-42% margin. After receiving the information from the CBO, independent women voters approved of Mr. Romney over President Obama by a margin of 50%-34%. But…what was it in the CBO data that changed the minds of these women so dramatically?

·      Americans know that the ACA requires insurance companies to allow families to keep adult children up to age 16 on their parents’ policy. They are less likely to know that the provision increased the average family premium—even for families that did not add adult dependents—by $150-$450/month in 2011.

·      The average family’s health insurance premium has already increased by $1300/year.

·      Young workers who buy their own insurance will see a 19%-30% increase in their premiums.

·      Originally, CBO predicted that 700,000 people would use the ACA’s federal high-risk program. Only 78,000 have signed up, making the cost to the taxpayer millions of allocated dollars for each applicant.

·      The ACA was sold as the solution to covering the 47 million uninsured people in America; but now the CBO estimates that after the law has been implemented for 10 years, 30 million Americans will still be uninsured.

·      Adding new patients to the Medicaid program, which will be a result of the ACA, means that doctors will have to see patients more quickly and spend less time with each patient in order to cover the overhead costs of practice. This means that doctors will be less inclined to take new Medicaid patients.

If you want to check this data, look at HealthReformQuestions.com; but be careful, the Obama campaign has overlaid this web site with an advertisement that pretends to refute these facts from the Congressional Budget Office. When you Google “Health Reform  Questions,” select the url 2^nd from the top. The top selection is the Obamacare advertisement.

The bottom line of all this is that “There’s no such thing as a free lunch!” The money has to come from somewhere; and no entitlement program is free.    

Millions Flee the Most Liberal State in the Union

In their recent book, “Why Nations Fail: the Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty,” Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson point out that over the past 22 years, 3.4 million Californians have quit the state in favor of states and nations that have lower tax rates. The causes of this mass exodus has not been taxes, alone. Other factors have been excessive business regulations, the high price of housing and commercial real estate, costly electricity, union power, and high labor costs.

California has been naturally blessed in the past with some of the most attractive natural resources in the world. California has nearly 850 miles of pristine Pacific Ocean coastline; some of the world’s most breathtaking forests, deserts, and mountains; abundant oil, gold, and agricultural resources. In the heavily populated coastal regions, is located one of the world’s very rare Mediterranean climates—warm summers and a relatively warm, very wet winter—this combination, along with the fertile soil will grow almost any agricultural product needed by man. Grafted on top of that natural bounty is an equally impressive cultural abundance: the verve for experimentation and innovation that birthed the entertainment industry in Southern California and Silicon Valley in the north.

But…what happened? The Golden State is beset by high unemployment (10.6 percent in August, behind only Rhode Island and Nevada) and consistently ranks as the nation’s worst business atmosphere.

What’s the reason for this social catastrophe? Bad government, high taxes, and overly enthusiastic business regulation. All this coupled with a penchant for buying things where there is no money to pay for them. For instance, California recently voted to fund a multimillion dollar project to study and advance the use of embryonic stem cells, a technology with very questionable probable outcomes.

Across the nation, states that embrace free-market principles are beating jurisdictions that prefer big government to within an inch of their lives. The conclusion is—states should be more like Texas and less like California.

States with unobtrusive government fare much better than governmental behemoths like California.  A comparison between the nine states with the highest and lowest tax burdens, for instance, shows remarkable disparities:

During the decade that ended in 2010, GDP in the low-tax states grew by 20 percent more than in the high-tax jurisdictions. Population growth in the low-tax states was nearly four times greater than in the high-tax states. And the low tax rates didn’t exactly make paupers out of the states that embraced them either; those jurisdictions actually realized substantially larger increases in the growth of state and local tax revenue than did their more confiscatory brethren.

The conclusion is obvious: States that embrace conservative policies – low taxes, restrained regulation, free labor markets, a friendly business environment consistently outperform states where big government carries the day.

Oh! How I wish the United States federal government could learn this lesson from the states.

 

 

Where Do Our Moral and Political Values Come From?

Today’s blog post is largely taken from a book by Jonathan Haidt, a liberal professor at New York University and the author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.  

Did you ever wonder why you believe the things you believe and why other people don’t see things the way you do? There have been three answers suggested to this question.

1)   Plato thought that our moral decisions were determined by our reason; and that our emotional responses followed those rational, thought-out, concepts.

2)    David Hume, the Scottish philosopher of the 18^th Century, thought that our emotional life is the prime mover in our moral decisions (and, thus, our political viewpoints). He thought that our rational selves then worked to justify what our emotions directed us to believe.

3)   Thomas Jefferson thought that our rational thinking and our emotional attitudes exist alongside of one another; they compete with one another, and the one that proves the stronger wins out in the end.

In his book, Haidt examines each of these possibilities through a series of very interesting experiments. He concludes that Hume is right—our emotional life is the determining factor in our belief systems. Our rationality follows what our emotions and our intuitions tell us is the right path of belief.

He points out that since our intuitions and our emotional mindsets are the final arbiters of our morals and our beliefs, it is useless to try to argue those who do not believe the way we believe into changing their attitudes in order to comport with our own. He reports that we can, however, influence others and cause them to come around to our way of thinking. But…it must be done on an emotional level and not on a rational, logical basis. In order to influence others, we must become their friend, their ally, their confidant. Sometimes, just showing them that we care about them and expressing our support for a point of view or a candidate that we support is enough to get them to look seriously at changing their affinities. That is the reason that yard signs work—the well-known technique of name recognition. They show that we, as constructive and helpful citizens, support one candidate or another. But…we cannot argue anyone into our political camp.

Here ends Haidt’s contribution to this post. Barack Obama is ahead in the polls not because he has the best program and certainly not because he has such a good record as a president. He is ahead because he connects with people on a more emotional level than does Mitt Romney. Obama exudes an attitude of confidence and every-day communication ability. He is likable! I only wish that there were a way of showing the American electorate that likability will not improve our situation with the national debt; and it will not help mend our damaged leadership position in the Middle East. Likability will not overcome the problems of out-of-control spending on give-away programs.

An end of likability will eventually come when America reaches the point where Greece and Spain have arrived—when there is no money available to borrow and where the free enterprise system has been stressed so badly that it can no longer grow and produce. Then…we will know the truth about likability!

The Fallacy of Redistribution

The following is a quote from Thomas Sowell published in the Patriot Post 9/19/12.

The recently discovered tape on which Barack Obama said back in 1998 that he believes in redistribution is not really news. He said the same thing to Joe the Plumber four years ago. But the surfacing of this tape may serve a useful purpose if it gets people to thinking about what the consequences of redistribution are.

Those who talk glibly about redistribution often act as if people are just inert objects that can be placed here and there, like pieces on a chess board, to carry out some grand design. But if human beings have their own responses to government policies, then we cannot blithely assume that government policies will have the effect intended.

The history of the 20th century is full of examples of countries that set out to redistribute wealth and ended up redistributing poverty. The communist nations were a classic example, but by no means the only example.

In theory, confiscating the wealth of the more successful people ought to make the rest of the society more prosperous. But when the Soviet Union confiscated the wealth of successful farmers, food became scarce. As many people died of starvation under Stalin in the 1930s as died in Hitler's Holocaust in the 1940s.

How can that be? It is not complicated. You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth -- and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated. Farmers in the Soviet Union cut back on how much time and effort they invested in growing their crops, when they realized that the government was going to take a big part of the harvest. They slaughtered and ate young farm animals that they would normally keep tending and feeding while raising them to maturity.

People in industry are not inert objects either. Moreover, unlike farmers, industrialists are not tied to the land in a particular country.

Russian aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky could take his expertise to America and produce his planes and helicopters thousands of miles away from his native land. Financiers are even less tied down, especially today, when vast sums of money can be dispatched electronically to any part of the world.

If confiscatory policies can produce counterproductive repercussions in a dictatorship, they are even harder to carry out in a democracy. A dictatorship can suddenly swoop down and grab whatever it wants. But a democracy must first have public discussions and debates. Those who are targeted for confiscation can see the handwriting on the wall, and act accordingly.

Among the most valuable assets in any nation are the knowledge, skills and productive experience that economists call "human capital." When successful people with much human capital leave the country, either voluntarily or because of hostile governments or hostile mobs whipped up by demagogues exploiting envy, lasting damage can be done to the economy they leave behind.

Fidel Castro's confiscatory policies drove successful Cubans to flee to Florida, often leaving much of their physical wealth behind. But poverty-stricken refugees rose to prosperity again in Florida, while the wealth they left behind in Cuba did not prevent the people there from being poverty stricken under Castro. The lasting wealth the refugees took with them was their human capital.

We have all heard the old saying that giving a man a fish feeds him only for a day, while teaching him to fish feeds him for a lifetime. Redistributionists give him a fish and leave him dependent on the government for more fish in the future.

If the redistributionists were serious, what they would want to distribute is the ability to fish, or to be productive in other ways. Knowledge is one of the few things that can be distributed to people without reducing the amount held by others.

That would better serve the interests of the poor, but it would not serve the interests of politicians who want to exercise power, and to get the votes of people who are dependent on them.

Barack Obama can endlessly proclaim his slogan of "Forward," but what he is proposing is going backwards to policies that have failed repeatedly in countries around the world.

Yet, to many people who cannot be bothered to stop and think, redistribution sounds good.

 

Life’s Changes

Nancy and I are living in a retirement center these days. We see around us trembling hands, stumbling feet, and confused minds. We can see what we will look like in the future. It doesn’t look good, I must admit. Changes come upon us all.
 

But physical changes in our bodies are not all the changes that come upon us. Our society and the social contract we have lived by for decades are changing, too.

 Our American constitutional framework has endured, but our national life has seen regular “surrogates for revolution.” The conflict over slavery shattered the political consensus of the early republic. The Republican Party was established in 1854 by abolitionists bent on changing America from its slave-holding propensities. The Republicans remained firmly in control of our nation politically for 60 years. That form of polity reflected a confident, moralistic Protestantism that saw the emerging American industrial power as a sure sign of divine providence.

But…that form of leadership could not deal with the social challenges of industrial society—labor unrest, mass immigration, and the dislocating effects of urbanization. The crisis of the Great Depression swept it away. By the 1950’s the Republican majorities had evaporated to be replaced by one that had decidedly leaned to the left, and the Democrat Party held the day—manifested in the New Deal of the Franklin Roosevelt administration. A new governing consensus had come into being, which believed that an activist government should lead the way in providing solutions to the economic and social problems facing the nation.

Now, in its turn, we see that the New Deal/Great Society consensus is under a great deal of stress. The global economy has brought changes that have dislocated workers from their jobs. Many middle-class Americans, especially white, high-school educated males, have suffered a significant decline in opportunity and income. Concerns about health, safety, the environment, non-discrimination, and so forth have created a vast regulatory network of government bureaucracy that adds friction to the economic machine. There are fewer young workers to sustain entitlement programs for retirees, making it unlikely that Social Security and Medicare can be sustained without significant changes. The system created by the New Deal consensus seems old, immobile, and unsustainable.

 What’s to become of the United States? I surely don’t know; but one thing is sure—change will occur. TEA Party populism on the right tells us that we cannot continue buying things we cannot pay for, redistributing money we don’t have, and bailing out businesses that fail. Occupy Wall Street populism on the left tells us that we must regain a lot of low-level laboring jobs for our displaced workers. Doubling down on the old New Deal consensus and putting our faith in 2008-style “hope and change” will not work.

 I am also sure that whatever happens to our political society, capitalism will not go away; and neither will the welfare state. Our country needs a unifying social consensus; and, unlikely as it may seem, history is replete with examples in which religion became the common denominator of lasting societies. Will that happen in the United States? Hmmm…we’ll see.

 Some of this post was taken from First Things, October 2012, page 3.

Depending on Dependency

I am sending along in this blog post the complete text of an essay by Thomas Sowell, an American economist, social theorist, political philosopher, and author. A National Humanities Medal winner, he advocates laissez-faire economics and writes from a conservative and libertarian perspective. This essay was posted on the Patriot Post today. Today in America, votes are being bought; this is a disgrace that must be avoided!

The theme that most seemed to rouse the enthusiasm of delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte was that we are all responsible for one another -- and that Republicans don't want to help the poor, the sick and the helpless.

All of us should be on guard against beliefs that flatter ourselves. At the very least, we should check such beliefs against facts.

Yet the notion that people who prefer economic decisions to be made by individuals in the market are not as compassionate as people who prefer those decisions to be made collectively by politicians is seldom even thought of as a belief that should be checked against facts.

Nor is this notion confined to Democrats in America today. Belief in the superior compassion of the political left is a worldwide phenomenon that goes back at least as far as the 18th century. But in all that time, and in all those places, there has been little, if any, effort on the left to check this crucial assumption against facts.

When an empirical study of the actual behavior of American conservatives and liberals was published in 2006, it turned out that conservatives donated a larger amount of money, and a higher percentage of their incomes (which were slightly lower than liberal incomes) to philanthropic activities.

Conservatives also donated more of their time to philanthropic activities and donated far more blood than liberals. What is most remarkable about this study are not just its results. What is even more remarkable is how long it took before anyone even bothered to ask the questions. It was just assumed, for centuries, that the left was more compassionate.

Ronald Reagan donated a higher percentage of his income to charitable activities than did either Franklin D. Roosevelt or Ted Kennedy. Being willing to donate the taxpayers' money is not the same as being willing to put your own money where your mouth is.

Milton Friedman pointed out that the heyday of free market capitalism in the 19th century was a period of an unprecedented rise in philanthropic activity. Going even further back in time, in the 18th century Adam Smith, the patron saint of free market economics, was discovered from records examined after his death to have privately made large charitable donations, far beyond what might have been expected from someone of his income level.

Helping those who have been struck by unforeseeable misfortunes is fundamentally different from making dependency a way of life.

Although the big word on the left is "compassion," the big agenda on the left is dependency. The more people who are dependent on government handouts, the more votes the left can depend on for an ever-expanding welfare state.

Optimistic Republicans who say that widespread unemployment and record numbers of people on food stamps hurt President Obama's reelection chances are overlooking the fact that people who are dependent on government are more likely to vote for politicians who are giving them handouts.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt understood that, back during the Great Depression of the 1930s. He was reelected in a landslide after his first term, during which unemployment was in double digits every single month, and in some months was over 20 percent.

The time is long overdue for optimistic Republicans to understand what FDR understood long ago, and what Barack Obama clearly understands today. Dependency pays off in votes -- unless somebody alerts the taxpayers who get stuck with the bill.

The Obama administration is shamelessly advertising in the media -- whether on billboards or on television -- for people to get on food stamps. Welfare state bureaucrats have been sent into supermarkets to tell shoppers that food stamps are available.

The intelligentsia have for decades been promoting the idea that there should be no stigma to accepting government handouts. Living off the taxpayers is portrayed as a "right" or -- more ponderously -- as part of a "social contract."

You may not recall signing any such contract, but it sounds poetic and high-toned. Moreover, it wins votes among the gullible, and that is the bottom line for welfare state politicians.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SWEDEN CONTROLED ENTITLEMENTS—SO CAN WE!

Sweden’s long-time Prime Minister from 1946-1969 has spoken of the entitlement programs of the country in terms of “the discontent of growing expectations.” In other words, as entitlements grow, the demands for more and more money from the government grows even faster.

The Prime Minister’s misgivings turned out to be accurate. The entitlement society is indeed a beast that feeds on itself. From 1959 to 1990 the total tax burden in Sweden grew from a moderate 25.2 percent to 52.3 percent. During the same time, the public sector share of GDP doubled, while private payrolls fell, predictably causing a decline in economic growth. In 1970 Sweden’s growth was second in the world only to Japan’s; in 1990 it was second-lowest in the 34 member countries of the Organization For Economic Co-operation and Development, even as entitlements and the public sector kept growing. Hence, a familiar choice: Either stop spending, or keep borrowing on the backs of future generations.

Sweden found out that a universal welfare state has consequences that run deeper than the economy, and are more difficult to reverse even than a two-decade-long economic disaster. Fundamental structures of civil society wilt when human responsibilities—including those towards future generations—are subsumed under government entitlements (in Sweden, giving to charity, absurdly, came to be considered a lack of solidarity, since it undermined the need for the welfare state); a sense of passivity spreads when people feel that personal happiness or despondency is independent of their own actions. The bureaucratic framework of the welfare state strongly affects the behavior of the electorate--why vote yourself out of a job? All of these factors made the prospects for Sweden to break the vicious spiral bleak indeed.

 So how did it turn out for Sweden? Against all odds, voters defied political expectations. In 1991 they removed the Social Democratic government that was in power and put in place a center-right government that attacked the fundamental problems of the welfare state. Economic monetary reforms and a sensible economy were established.

Sweeping reforms of the social security system were established, allowing individuals to invest part of their social security tax in private funds. These reforms secured the solvency of the system for future generations. Today, more than half of the population has, at some point, actively chosen to participate in the private market (the money for those who choose not to participate goes automatically into a state-run investment fund).

 In addition to the system’s -market-based aspects, it also contains a circuit-breaker that kicks in when the economy is in recession, which in effect means that retirees receive a lower pension in hard times.

 It is not easy to say whether all of this happened because of good political leadership, or if it was a case of popular sentiment forcing politicians to take action. Either way, a retirement reform with clear similarities to the Ryan plan for Medicare stands as the symbol of a remarkable development in a country that only 30 years ago was on the brink of socializing corporate profits so as to continue down the road to ruin. It is all the more remarkable considering that Sweden was the paradigm of a European entitlement society. http://bit.ly/TwVzJS

 Questions we, Americans need to answer are these: Is the federal government supposed to cater to our every need or desire? Does government have the responsibility to redistribute property in accordance with theoretical and arbitrary ideas of fairness, or should it rather concentrate on ensuring that property is earned fairly and in accordance with the rule of law?

 Americans have become increasingly dependent on the government—for jobs, benefits, pensions, and health care. We are dependent on overseas energy and on cheap goods from China. We are dependent on consumer debt issued by a consolidated financial system in which the largest institutions game the financial system in their favor. Thanks to the Federal Reserve, they are allowed to borrow money at almost no interest; and we, the savers, get no interest payments for our investments.

We need to vote this kind of government out of business. But…it will be very hard to vote a give-away party out of power. Many people are surviving because they have government jobs. Who are they to vote their privileges away?!