Saturday, December 12, 2009

Principled Politics – 12/12/09

A Warning on Warming by Rich Tucker at Townhall
  If there's one thing a non-scientist needs to understand, it's this: science is never truly "settled." Any theory, no matter how widely accepted or how effectively it appears to be explain the natural world, must be open to amendment if verifiable new information is unearthed….
  For the next week, international bigwigs including President Obama will be in Copenhagen, chattering about global warming. But the rest of us now have evidence of something we’ve long suspected: such talk is just a lot of hot air. The science isn’t settled. Neither is the debate over “global warming.” Read more…

First, the Good News... – Larry Kudlow at Townhall
  Retail sales totally beat Wall Street estimates with a huge 1.3 percent gain in November. Core retail sales have increase 5.6 percent at an annual rate over the past three months. Family net wealth has rebounded $5 trillion over the past six months. Jobless claims keep trending lower. Business sales, up 1.1 percent in October (the latest data), have jumped 10.1 percent annually over the past three months. And business inventories, led by manufacturing, also rose in October…
   In the longer run, we’re staring at a European-style socialism-lite model that places government above private investment. Hence, animal spirits may be dulled, along with Schumpeterian gales of creative destruction. A top-heavy government sector will steadily reduce the economy’s potential to grow and raise the inflation rate as too much money chases too few goods….
  All this helps explain why long-term economic growth is likely to slow to a 2 percent zone, rather than cruise in the 3.5 percent zone of the 1980s and 1990s. The primacy of government over private enterprise has been tried, and has failed dismally.
  I remember when Pres. Ronald Reagan talked about “we the people,” borrowing from the Preamble to the Constitution. To the Gipper, “we the people” meant the government works for us -- we don’t work for the government. It’s our money. And we should get it back through tax cuts whenever possible.
  Mr. Reagan was talking about economic freedom. Unfortunately, that freedom is becoming a scarce commodity. Read more…

More, More, More - Watch what they spend, not what they say. – From The WSJ
  When it comes to spending, the Democrats who run Washington can't decide on their message. On the one hand, as President Obama said this week, they claim we have to "spend our way out of this recession." On the other, they keep telling us the deficit is too large and isn't "sustainable." In this tug of political spin, watch what they spend, not what they say…
  Even harder to figure is Mr. Obama, who is likely to sign this budget behemoth even as he keeps telling us it's time to "make the hard choices necessary to get our country on a more stable fiscal footing in the long run." Word is that his 2011 budget proposal will propose a spending freeze of some kind, which is another election-year pivot.
  After so much double talk, we've concluded this is all part of a conscious political strategy. Spend so much and run up the deficit to unprecedented levels, then turn around and claim that there's a fiscal crisis that can only be solved with higher taxes. They spend, you pay! Read more…

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