A VAT will be shooting ourselves in the other foot

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, Version 4.0 Posted on by

A VAT will cause job loss

The recent idea of President Obama and Democrats about adding a VAT (Value Added Tax) to help pay for health care is serious mistake. It will cause more job loss and end up generating less tax revenue than projected. Why?

VAT will add to the cost of American-made goods, but not to foreign-made goods. As a result there will be fewer American-made goods and more foreign-made goods purchased. This will cause American companies to make more products outside the United States and create higher unemployment.

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A Different Solution to Concentrated Economic Power is Needed

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Too Big to Fail?

In 2008 and 2009 the United States encountered an economic crisis brought about by corporations “too big to fail” and government guarantees that encouraged corruption in the financial markets and banking industry.

Both the Bush and Obama administrations bought the “too big to fail” argument. Clearly, huge CEO pay and ponzi schemes are wrong. By the time the crisis occurred, Pres. Bush, already a “lame duck” president, allowed those people who caused the problem to try to correct their own mistakes (with a taxpayer bailout). The result of the bailout was further concentration of economic power. What did the banks do with their bailout? They bought other banks, so that the result was fewer and bigger banks.

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Government Housing and the Coming Health Insurance Bubble

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Public Housing in New York

If you want a glimpse of what you can expect from total government health care, you can look at public housing.

I visited a hospital in Poland in 1990 that was in worse shape than this housing project on the left. The building itself was more deteriorated, the equipment was old, much of it was not working, and patients were lined up in the hallways with no privacy.

I had been invited by the local doctors to tour the facilities because they had heard an American was in town. They were seeking any type of second-hand equipment that was being replaced in the US, because it was better than what they had. These were highly educated people, very compassionate and concerned for the welfare of their patients, and they worked long hours. The only difference is that everything depended on the government, and the government was broke. It had other priorities.

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Beyond the New Tribalism and Racism in the U.S.: An Argument for Apportioned Taxes and Distributions

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No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken. —U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 9

The Founding Fathers had it right. They knew that direct taxes on citizens would allow politicians and lobbyists to pick and choose among citizens: who to tax harder, who to tax lighter. They knew that direct taxes might hit some states harder than others. Most importantly, they knew that the role of the Federal Government was Defense of the people, and that each person, rich or poor had a life that was equally worth defending. Therefore, the states were to pay apportioned taxes to the Federal Government to do this job.

But then tribalism and racism that the Civil War had been fought to end began anew.

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Battling Bureaucracy in Minnesota

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Annual LEA Meeting , Feb. 11, 2010

Battling Bureaucracy and Holding Government Agencies Accountable

Introduction to the Topic for the Annual Minnesota LEA Meeting, Feb. 11, 2010

Government agencies can be a useful tool to carry out the will of the people. They can manage water, sewers, roads, borders, and provide many other public services. They can administer these services impartially with respect to age, race, or religion. Some type of bureaucracy is essential when an agency is charged with a mission that serves thousands or millions of people. Government agencies are created for the public good. But, too often bureaucracies are a symptom of personal irresponsibility and the desire to let someone else solve our problems. They can grow uncontrollably and spend tax dollars foolishly. Once they have served their purpose, they are hard to terminate. They are hard to hold accountable.

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Inspector says TARP has so far failed its purpose

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The Office of the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (“SIGTARP”) seems as frustrated with TARP as middle-class Americans. It’s recently released its Quarterly Report to Congress has concluded:

Even if TARP saved our financial system from driving off a cliff back in 2008, absent meaningful reform, we are still driving on the same winding mountain road, but this time in a faster car.

The report concluded that the costs of TARP “will have been for naught if we do nothing to correct the fundamental problems in our financial system and end up in a similar or even greater crisis in two, or five, or ten years’ time.”

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Creating More Real Jobs will Require a More Level Playing Field

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Obama recognized the need for jobs, but didn’t propose a real solution
Last night President Obama made the creation of jobs the priority in his speech, but he did not offer any real solutions. When a government “creates jobs,” it does so by redistribution of economic resources, not by growing the economy. Somebody who is working or running a business has to pay for those government jobs. This can work reasonably well if the government is redistributing a small portion of the spillover of a strong economy.

We have hit a critical point where the private economy cannot support the government and health care
However, you cannot create an entire economy, or make an economy more healthy by increasing redistribution after the critical mass has been hit. At that point adding a government job begins to exponentially and negatively impact jobs in the economic sector. Today over 55% of all full-time jobs in the U.S. are government jobs, government contracts with private employers, jobs in the medical industry, or jobs in the pharmaceutical industry. We have hit that critical mass.
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The Lack of Math and Science Majors are a Symptom, Not the Cause

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On Wednesday, January 6, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story on President Obama’s announced “partnership between federal agencies and public universities to train thousands more mathematics and science teachers each year, part of the administration’s effort to make American students more competitive globally in science, technology, engineering, and math.”

The article said that “leaders of 121 public universities have pledged to increase the total number of science and math teachers they prepare every year to 10,000 by 2015.” The year 2015 reminded me of the UN Millennium goals aimed at eradicating poverty set in 2000. A decade later we find hopes of achieving these goals rapidly fading as 2015 comes closer and more people than ever are starving, for many reasons, including intra-state power struggles and higher-priced food as a result of diversion of low-priced food into biofuels.

When political leaders set targets beyond their term of office, without methods to show how their own administration actually started meeting the targets, you have to wonder how serious they are, or whether their program is some feeble effort to remain popular by appearing to address the subject. President Obama is obviously concerned about the dwindling number of math and science majors among students, but requesting colleges and universities to produce more is a sign that he fails to understand the core reasons why the number of math and science students is dwindling.

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Real Climate Stewardship: Reduce Flaring Oil Wells and Encourage Clean Coal Plants

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, Version 4.0 Posted on by

Climategate has made it difficult for the average citizen to believe that governments are capable of real environmental care. Falling prey to global warming theories of a few elite climate snake-oil salesmen turned Copenhagen into “Jokenhagen.”

For example, in the mainstream media (controlled by elites who have bought up much of the independent media that used to serve as a watchdog for the truth) we see a fixation on the “problem” of CO2, a relatively harmless “greenhouse gas” which plants need to grow to make the planet green, rather than more genuine problems like sulfur emissions from coal plants, or methane releases or flares from oil wells where greed for oil money in Venezuela, Russia, and the Middle East leads to the release or burning of enough natural gas to fuel both France and Germany for a year.
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Congress Shall Make no Law Respecting an Establishment of Commerce

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This article discusses a concept in my book Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, Version 4.0 that was published in World&I Online April, 2008. It continues to be more timely as we continue to allow special interests tear our governments apart.

Introduction

Modern society consists of three major components: (1) culture, (2) government, and (3) the economy. The founders of the United States specified the relationship between culture and government in the first amendment, which forbids the establishment of religion, but they did not make a similar declaration with respect to the relationship between government and the economy. In their day, the economy did not exist in separate concentrations of power since it was mostly based on family-run businesses and farms.

However, human freedom requires freedom in the economic sphere as well as the religious and political spheres. Following industrialization in the nineteenth century, corporations were given more power by the courts, amassed greater capital, and eventually used that power to displace the political and economic power of ordinary citizens. A socialist backlash attempted to use the force of government to plan industrial output. In Europe, these two trends led to different forms of totalitarianism. On the right we had National Socialism and Fascism and on the left we had Communism.
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