Category Archives: Throw Da Bums Out

King Coal

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Having learned how by stealing General Motors from stockholders like thee and me, Mr. Obama has now done the same to the coal industry: he broke it and is handing it to his supporters.

“Filings with the Securities and Exchange commission show that between April and June this year Soros Fund Management (SFM) bought more than 1 million shares in Peabody, the world’s largest private coal company, and 500,000 shares in Arch.”

In 2009, Mr. Soros pledged to spend $1 billion of his own money on renewable energy at Al Gore’s urging and funded the Far Green “Climate Policy Initiative” thinktank. At the time, he said: “There is no magic bullet for climate change, but there is a lethal bullet: coal.”

A spokesman for SFM declined to comment on the investments. Wotta surprise.

 

PreDICKtions

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A few weeks ago, I boldly predicted that the general election would be Trump v. Sanders.

The candidates the media pretends can’t win:
A Wall Street Journal editorial says Donald Trump taps into the worst of the electorate.

The harsher Des Moines Register editorializes that Mr. Trump should “pull the plug on his bloviating side show.” Bloviating?

WaPo asks “Was Bernie Sanders really lying about the effect of budget cuts?” Lying?

The candidates the media pretends can’t lose:
The NYTimes reports ever so hopefully that Gov. John Kasich is rising in the polls in New Hampshire, winning endorsements and drawing new voters to his appearances who were impressed with his debate performance.

The Atlantic calls Maryland’s Martin O’Malley “a Democrat’s dream candidate. In two terms as the governor of Maryland, he’s ushered in a sweeping liberal agenda that includes gay marriage, gun control, an end to the death penalty, and in-state college tuition for undocumented immigrants. He’s trim and handsome; he plays in an Irish rock band.”

“He has become ‘the distraction with traction’ — a feckless blowhard who can generate headlines, name recognition and polling numbers not by provoking thought, but by provoking outrage.”

Back to Mr. Trump and Mr. Sanders.

One candidate attracts working class voters with caustic slander about entitlement and abortion and Iran and the economy and repealing the 2010 Unaffordable Care Act. He does not provoke thought, but rather provokes outrage.

Oh. Wait. I can’t tell if that list is Mr. Trump’s or Mr. Sanders’.

Mr. Trump can’t win. Except he got a better reception at the Iowa State Fair than Sarah Palin, Barack Obama, or George W. Bush.

And Mr. Sanders can’t win. He even schooled Chuck Todd on why he is nothing like Donald Trump. Except he’s wrong again; he’s exactly like the Donald, a blowhard who has tapped into the same sentiments for overthrowing the status quo.

The “feckless blowhards” might just win their primaries.

And maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

Back in 2008, I wrote

We need a loose cannon running for President, darn it. After all, the President sets policy, not the Vice President. The President writes pardons, not the Vice President. The President vetoes bills, not the Vice President. The President gets the glory and the barbs, not the Vice President.
Candidates who want to “change the system” don’t want to change the system; candidates who want to change the system actually want their own policies implemented in the system. A true loose cannon doesn’t care about the system. A true loose cannon will subvert the system and find a way to get some real work done.

Now for the Veep.
Getting the work done probably means having an actual politician around for those days you have to game the system. Elect a politician Vice President.

Messrs. Kasich and O’Malley both talk a good game. Both have achieved big political gains within their own states.

I think either would make a great V.P. for their respective parties.


Red States-Blue States
 None of this is a particularly good thing for the U.S. of A.

Strike!

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“We need to go on strike!” My friend Lido Bruhl shouted.

From the You Can’t Make this Stuff up department.

“They can’t rise if the minimum wage is too low to live on,” democratic candidate Hillary Clinton said in a speech Friday.

The minimum wage is the least an employer can pay an hourly employee; it has been pegged at $7.25 an hour since 2009; some states and cities have raised their minimum wage higher than that.

Many politicians want to raise it to $15/hour.

Just 4.3% of hourly workers 16 years old and older earn at or below the prevailing minimum wage but 42% of all U.S. workers earn $15 or less. Since about 60% of the U.S. workforce of some 122.9 million full time workers overall are paid hourly, more than 70 million workers now make less than that magic $15/hour. (BLS defines full-time workers as those who usually work 35 hours or more per week.)

“We need to go on strike!” Lido “Lee” Bruhl is a now retired newspaper editor who lives on Social Security with help from his wife and his daughter Greta.

Wait.

What?

What’s a state-run lottery?
It’s another extra tax on people who can’t do math.

Let’s start with some basic facts about Social Security today.

“If it weren’t for Social Security more than one-third of us older Americans would be living in poverty,” he said. “As it is, we worked all our lives and now we’re living on minimum wage!”

Wait.

What?

Regular readers may recall a chart I created last year to compare the minimum wage with the Federal Poverty Line. People working for minimum wage have consistently earned more than the Federal poverty level every year since 1957. Here are those figures updated.


2016 Minimum Wage Chart

Among “elderly” Social Security recipients, 22% of married couples and about 47% of unmarried persons rely on Social Security for 90% or more of their income. Ouch!

There are 41,362,000 elderly recipients. About half of them receive the average “benefit” of around $1,300 per month or less. That’s about $43 more per month than minimum wage. And it is considerably less than that after deducting for Medicare premiums.

The definition of poverty is income below $11,770 this year. Working 40 hours at minimum wage earns you $15,080. (Heck, if you work 35 hours at minimum wage, you earn $13,195.) And the average Social Security check will bring in $15,988 this year.

We don’t need to argue about whether “poverty” in the United States doesn’t look at all like the hand-to-mouth existence of the poor in, say, Mexico. If you can afford cigarettes and a smart phone, you aren’t poor.

“I don’t smoke. I can’t afford it,” Lee said. “I don’t have a smart phone for the same reason.”

Now for the politics (and you thought I’d never get here).

The American retirement system is designed so smart politicians can keep American workers and retirees alike in servitude to the government but the idea of raising the minimum wage is designed for people who can’t do math.

Want to know why politicians want the minimum wage to rise?
The income tax you pay goes up when your paycheck goes up.

Want to know why politicians want wages to rise?

It’s simple. The income tax you pay goes up when your paycheck goes up. The income tax rate you pay goes from zero at minimum wage to about 13%, meaning you’ll owe $4,060 when your paycheck goes up to $15/hour. All those new taxpayers.

What happens when 70 million people get a raise to $15/hour?

The first thing that happens is a brief surge in government revenues as payroll taxes skyrocket.

The second thing that happens is 25 million people get their hours cut. The politicians forgot that part.

The third thing that happens is 25 million new unemployment applications. The politicians forgot that part.

The fourth thing that happens is 10 million pissed off workers because they no longer make more than minimum wage. The politicians forgot that part.

The fifth thing that happens is an inflationary spiral. The politicians forgot that part.

The sixth thing that happens is an increase in the Federal Poverty Level. The politicians probably remembered that part.

And almost 21 million Social Security recipients won’t be able to afford the stamp to write to their Congress Critter because they will suddenly be back under the poverty line.

My friend Lee Bruhl was right.

We need to strike.

He’s just wrong about the reason.

 

It’s a Gas!

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Hillary2.0 began the first rally of her campaign with a sharp attack on Republicans. “There may be some new voices in the presidential Republican choir,” she said. “But they’re all singing the same old song.”

Would those lyrics be “Dem policies cost too much, cost too much!”?

I drove the east coast last week, right through the heart of red states and blue states.


3-Month Gas Price, US v. San Francisco

The cheapest gas I saw was in South Carolina at $2.339.

Prior to the 1960s, Democrats were “firmly in control of the government of South Carolina at all levels. The state Republican Party was little more than a country club group… [but] from 1964 to present, the Republican Party has gradually gained strength and by the 1990s it became the dominant party of the state.”

It turns out that the Hillary constituency digs deeper at the gas pump than most North Puffin Perspective™ readers. Drivers in Santa Barbara, for example, pay 75 cents more per gallon than drivers in Tulsa, OK. The pattern repeats in all the liberal strongholds from the Left Coast where gas prices are on the wrong side of $3.50 per gallon to New England and the Northeast where $3 per gallon is the rule. The solid Republican regions across the Midwest and South have the nation’s lowest prices, well below $2.50 per gallon.


3-Month Gas Price, Vermont, NY, and South Carolina

On my road trip last week, I paid more for gas in the Peoples’ Republic of Vermont than in the Keys. In fact, I paid more for gas in Vermont than in any other state.

Florida $2.639 (in the Keys)
Georgia $2.459
South Carolina $2.339
Virginia $2.499
Pennsylvania $2.799 at the Sunoco at Davisville Road (I didn’t buy any)
New Jersey $2.429 (the attendant pumped it and washed my windshield)
New York Northway $2.839
Vermont $2.839

Blown away I was when I saw the price at the pump over the bridge in Vermont was exactly the same as the price in New York State. I drove into Vermont on fumes because I refused to pay that New York price.

New York stations have always charged a dime or two more than Vermont stations because New York gas taxes total 62.9 cents per gallon but Vermont gets “only” 48.9 cents per gallon. Now that extra 14 cents is going straight into gouging in an oh-so-very liberal state but that’s another story.

As a general rule of thumb, every penny we save on a gallon of gasoline results in about $1 billion of money that you and I can spend on stuff. That’s not trivial, even when all the 140-ish million U.S. car owners have to split it. Let me do the math for you. A penny puts seven bucks in your pocket if you drive an average number of miles. I get more because my truck gets lousy mileage. A dime at the pump gets us $71 each. A dollar difference at the pump means my road trip from South Puffin to North Puffin cost me $100 less.

One hundred dollars.

So, here’s the $64 question: Why do liberals vote against their own self interest, let alone against yours and mine? I mean does the liberal really like paying more for gasoline and food and doctoring and taxes and Kool Aid™?

 

Blimps and Flying Bicycles

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Have ye been wondering how a 61-year old postal carrier managed to land his flying bicycle on the Capitol lawn?

Me, too.

Police arrested Douglas Hughes after he steered his tiny gyrocopter onto the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol after flying right up the National Mall through the ultra-restricted airspace. He took off from Gettysburg which is more than an hour away from the no-fly zone over Washington. Apparently no one knew he was there until he landed.

Mr. Hughes had told the world he would do it by way of his website dedicated to this act of civil disobedience. He aimed to deliver 535 letters personally by “air mail” to members of Congress. “The unending chase for money I believe threatens to steal our democracy itself,” Hughes wrote to the Tampa Bay Times. “I’m demanding reform and declaring a voter’s rebellion.”

The quotes from those parts of the government assigned to protect us tell us the real story, though.

“Oh, he flew under the radar.”
“Oh, our long guns would have shot him out of the sky had he gotten any closer.”

Let’s think about that.

He got within a few hundred feet of Congress. Long guns like the M107 can shoot a couple thousand yards.

How much closer did they want him?

And it turns out Mr. Hughes didn’t fly under the radar. There wasn’t any radar.

The Army’s “Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System” is designed specifically to catch flying bicycles. This JLENS “aerostat radar system” will someday track boats, ground vehicles, cruise missiles, and manned and unmanned aircraft like gyrocopters. The system has two tethered helium/air mix blimps, armored mooring stations, radars, and a processing station designed to communicate with anti-missile and other ground and airborne systems. It was to have been deployed over the Capitol. It has a catchy name, anyway.

Sadly it isn’t out of “testing” yet.

Huh. They pointed this program at the Capitol about September 12, 2001, coming up 14 years ago but it started in back in 1996 which is darned near two decades now. A three-year exercise for one of the only two JLENS orbits is slated to begin sometime this year at Aberdeen Proving Ground. Contingent upon federal funding, of course.

You might recall that we decided to go to the Moon and do the other things on September 12, 1962. And Neil Armstrong took that small step on July 20, 1969, not quite half of 14 years later.

It gets worse.

We already had a Tethered Aerostat Radar System up and running in December, 1980 at Cudjoe Key, Florida.

Fat Albert over Cudjoe Key1980.

And it ain’t even rocket science.

See that tethered Air Force Tethered Aerostat Radar System (the one that looks sooooooooo much like “JLENS”) was capable of detecting low flying objects and to track boats, ground vehicles, cruise missiles, and manned and unmanned aircraft like gyrocopters. Its primary mission has been to watch over counter-drug operations. Just having the blimp present used to deterred crime in the nations southernmost border. It has also proved a huge help to the US Coast Guard with drug interdiction through the years.

“Used to” because, after more than 30 years of service, all the TARS sites including Fat Albert were deflated due to cuts to the federal defense budget. And so the Army could develop JLENS.

But now we have 20 years and $2.78 billions in testing of “JLENS.”

Just another reason to wonder how good this government is at doing the other things they say they excel at.


“Change we can believe in”
has become
“Failure we can count on.”