Defense on a Diet

Cutting the Pentagon is a question of strategy—as well as fiscal sanity.

In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama made an attempt to placate critics of his fiscal profligacy by proposing a three-year freeze in federal spending. Republicans immediately cried foul, noting that outlays would remain stuck at the administration’s bloated levels. The more serious among them also point out that Obama excluded the biggest entitlement programs—Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security—making his moratorium no exercise in spending restraint at all.

Yet there were fewer objections to the fourth category of spending Obama exempted: expenditures “related to our national security.” No one wants the federal government to pinch pennies when it comes to its paramount constitutional responsibility, protecting the physical security of the United States. But the Cato Institute’s Christopher Preble and the National Security Network’s Heather Hurlbut argued shortly afterward in Politico that much of what is spent in the name of security serves no such purpose.

Even freezing defense spending at current levels would be an expensive bargain: the Pentagon’s base budget was $548.9 billion in fiscal 2011. That’s not counting the additional $182 billion requested that year for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, conflicts that have already cost the country $1 trillion. Costs can be expected to rise even more: inflation-adjusted military spending has increased by 60 percent over the past decade, prompting Preble and Hurlbut to write, “because our national security rests on our economic health as well as on the strength of our military, a liberal and a libertarian can agree that the Pentagon should no longer get a pass.”

Republican Déjà Vu

Pardon me while I yawn.

I remember all too well in 1994 when the Republicans regained control of not only the House, but the Senate as well. I remember sitting in my car and anxiously listening to Rush Limbaugh’s first radio show after the election. I remember speaking with my Republican congressman at the time on a local call-in radio talk show. I asked him when the new Republican-controlled Congress would begin repealing some of the legislation passed during the first two years of Clinton’s reign. The congressman told me he would have to stand in line to introduce such legislation because of everything the Republicans had planned.

Republicans managed to stay in power throughout the rest of Clinton’s presidency. But what did we get for it? Did Republicans repeal the Family and Medical Leave Act? Did they eliminate foreign aid? Did they repeal the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act? Did they lower overall federal spending? Did they repeal the Motor Voter Act? Did they eliminate any substantial business regulations? Did they repeal the Violence Against Women Act? Did they cut Social Security and Medicare? Did they repeal the Earned Income Credit? Did they eliminate any federal agencies or programs? Did they repeal any significant pieces of legislation passed during any previous administration? Did they shrink the U.S. empire?

Ben Bernanke Hates the Poor

How Ben Bernanke Screwed the Poor and America

Meanwhile, "core CPI" will provide Bernanke cover for awhile longer as he throws the Fed's printing machines into overdrive, floods the market with fake currency, and screws over the masses in general ... particularly the bottom 20% whose "food and energy purchases represent over 50% of their after-tax income."

This is a giant wealth-transfer scheme, transferring wealth from hard-working Americans to a fraudulent government and banking cartel.

Foreclosure 2010

Foreclosure Monthly, November 2010

Spice!

Unintended Consequences of the War on Drugs

This week in my local newspaper, Florida’s Lieutenant Governor Jeff Kottkamp wrote an op-ed reporting that a drug known as “Spice” is becoming “… a nightmare for law enforcement, because it is sold and used openly as a so-called legal alternative to marijuana. Currently, there is no way to test for the use of Spice — making it that much more attractive to would-be users.”

Kottkamp reports, “Spice is, in fact, more potent and more dangerous than marijuana.”

The issue here is not about Spice; it is about alternatives to marijuana. Making Spice illegal would simply open the door for drug entrepreneurs to develop other recreational drugs that are “more potent and more dangerous than marijuana.”

We’ve been fighting a war on drugs for 30 years, and the drugs are winning. There is ample evidence that the harm from illegal drugs comes more from the fact that they are illegal than that they are drugs.

I am no advocate of recreational drug use. Following Nancy Reagan, if someone offers you some, my advice would be to “Just Say No!” But there are two strong arguments in favor of legalization. One is that this used to be a free country, and freedom has to mean the freedom to make what people in the government think are bad choices. Another more utilitarian argument is that the harm from their illegality is greater than the harm from the drug use itself.

Elvis Costello - National Ransom

Elvis Costello Understands Money (VIDEO)

Dollar Death Spiral

Glenn Beck on the Dollar Destroyers (VIDEO)

Glenn Beck does a decent job here of explaining "quantitative easing" (aka printing money, aka monetizing the debt). 

 
Ron Paul on the Dollar Destroyers (VIDEO)

Very informative interview with Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) and Judge Andrew Napolitano on QE2 and the Federal Reserve.

Copyright Jihad

The Copyright Jihad Strikes Again

Well, I know I’ve downloaded my last song from an RIAA-affiliated company after reading this story:

What’s the value of a song? Jammie Thomas-Rasset has spent the last few years in court debating that question. The Minnesota mother of four is being penalized for illegally downloading and sharing 24 songs on the peer-to-peer file-sharing network Kazaa in 2006, but how much she owes the record labels has been in question. The jury in her third trial has just ruled that Thomas-Rasset should pay Capitol Records $1.5 million, CNET reports, which breaks down to $62,500 per song. It’s a heavy penalty considering the 24 tunes would only cost approximately $24 on iTunes, which was Thomas-Rasset’ argument, too.

Absolutely stupid. Insane!

Human Slaughter as "Stimulus"

The Keynesian welfare state is best described as the mild-mannered alter ego of the totalitarian welfare state. The official alchemists responsible for transmuting debt into political power eventually find it impossible to siphon wealth out of the productive class in amounts sufficient to meet the needs of the political class. When this happens, the ruling elite will inevitably turn to bloodshed as a source of economic "stimulus."

David Broder of the Washington Post scandalized the punditocracy by openly reciting this formula in a recent column as a prescription for both the ailing economy and Barack Obama's increasingly enfeebled presidency.

"Look back at FDR and the Great Depression," advised Meet The Press's resident droning dullard. "What finally resolved that economic crisis? World War II.... With strong Republican support in Congress for challenging Iran's ambition to become a nuclear power, [Obama] can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve."

"I am not suggesting, of course, that the president incite a war to get reelected," lied Broder immediately after doing exactly that. "But the nation will rally around Obama because Iran is the greatest threat to the world in the young century. If he can confront this threat and contain Iran's nuclear ambitions, he will have made the world safer and may be regarded as one of the most successful presidents in history"

How Iran, or any other country on earth, could threaten the world more than a regime capable of concocting a conflict as an economic stimulus program, Broder didn't explain. His suggestion shocked Washington's jaw-waggers and chin-pullers -- not so much because of its content, but rather because of its candor. It may be obvious to perceptive adults that wars are manufactured in such cynical ways, but it's bad form to offer unvarnished admissions of that kind in public.

Read the whole thing here: Slaughter as "Stimulus"

Dollar Collapse

Bernanke’s QE2 Death Spiral

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke announced today that the Fed will purchase $600 billion of long-term Treasuries between now and the end of the second quarter 2011. This btw, is on top of another approximately $300 billion in purchases from reinvesting principle payments from its agency debt and mortgage portfolio over the same period.

In other words, Bernanke is going to destroy the dollar. We will see double-digit inflation by the end of next year.