U.S. in the best of hands

U.S. Government Used Taxpayer Funds to Buy, Sell Weapons During 'Fast and Furious,' Documents Show

Not only did U.S. officials approve, allow and assist in the sale of more than 2,000 guns to the Sinaloa cartel -- the federal government used taxpayer money to buy semi-automatic weapons, sold them to criminals and then watched as the guns disappeared.  

This disclosure, revealed in documents obtained by Fox News, could undermine the Department of Justice's previous defense that Operation Fast and Furious was a "botched" operation where agents simply "lost track" of weapons as they were transferred from one illegal buyer to another. Instead, it heightens the culpability of the federal government as Mexico, according to sources, has opened two criminal investigations into the operation that flooded their country with illegal weapons...

 This Fast&Furious/Gunwalker thing is outrageous, a snarl of corrupt motivation, bone-headed conception, botched execution, topped off with an attempted cover-up by DOJ, ATF, and perhaps Executive Branch people located outside those agencies.  The number of murders this fiasco has produced, on both sides of the border and continuing into the indefinite future, is gruesome to contemplate.

The scandal directly involves core agencies of law enforcement of the US Government.  Heads must roll. The rot in Obama's DOJ needs to be cleaned out, starting with his buddy, AG Eric Holder.

A special prosecutor should have been appointed before now. Why hasn't that happened?  Anger among Mexican officials and citizens is not going to dissipate, quite the opposite, and it's completely justified. There will be no sweeping under the rug.

It's likely that the Solyndra funding mess will require a special prosecutor, also, for some of the same reasons.

Byron

Seen and unseen

This is very interesting, analogous to the "broken windows" problem in economics. Which means a socialist won't be able to understand this, either:

A counter-terrorism bleg


My own favorite economics example of this sort is a story about Henry Ford, whose goal was to produce affordable automobiles. So, when he traveled around, he'd make sure to visit local auto junkyards, where he'd examine junked Fords to see what parts had failed. The one part he noticed that never failed was the flywheel, even on cars with extremely high mileage. Ford's response was the only one that made sense to him: He ordered the factory the cheapen the flywheels. A million-mile flywheel in a 100,000-mile car is just a waste of the customer's money.

A socialist planner would probably issue directives to bring the whole car up to the standard of the flywheel, which would price the car out of reach of all but the wealthy, but that would be unfair. That problem would be solved by government subsidies and rebates collected from other people's taxes. What's unseen in that case is the government distortion of consumer demand:  Some goods and services people would like to buy are not bought, because the money is being taken by the government and redistributed to subsidize someone else's car purchase. Or to subsidize a boondoggle $535,000,000 solar panel factory. But I digress.

Byron

GOP debate: Ugh

Special Editorial: Yikes

I can't stand to watch these "debates," but by all accounts last night's hootnanny was a disaster for Perry, who's now being referred to as "Texas Toast," and highly unimpressive for Romney, who's had a lot of time to polish his act, but obviously spent it doing other things.

In other words, the retreads went flat, and the new guy got his tongue, and maybe his brain, caught in the spokes. This party badly needs to have the young talent (Rubio, Ryan, Christy, etc,) push its way to front and center.  What we see up there now looks like collection of has-beens, never-weres, and screwballs who are all on a mission to make Barack Obama look like the reasonable choice.

My takeaway is never, ever to underestimate the GOP's ability to fumble, even now that Obama's catastrophic performance in office has placed the ball on the one yard-line and a touchdown is not much more than a matter of falling forward.

Too much to expect, apparently.

Byron

Parallel universe

We're Sinking Under Obama's Policies

The head-scratching continues as stocks take another leg down. Why, they ask, must the market be so negative? With an economy buckling under leftist incompetence, what, we ask, is there to be positive about? Funny, because it’s been going on for almost three years now, but hardly a day goes by without some bit of bad news the media calls ‘unexpected.’
But investors have noticed. . . . Since this president took office, U.S. businesses have shed 3.3 million jobs. We are still 6.9 million below our peak employment reached in January 2008. Ordinarily, more than two years after a recession has ended, well over a million jobs have been added to payrolls. By any meaningful measure, then, our president has followed the least-successful economic policies of any U.S. leader since World War II. As recession seems ever more possible, the IMF warns of a U.S. ‘lost decade.’

And surely this huge loss in the value of stocks means delayed retirement for many older workers, whose annuity payouts would now be much reduced.  The decline in home equity due to the collapse of the real estate market, and the difficulty of selling the house you own, adds to the problem.

When there isn't enough economic growth to increase the total supply of jobs, employment becomes a zero-sum game: When those who want to retire are forced to keep working, the jobs they hold do not become available for younger people, either via promotion or new hiring.

And when it becomes difficult for people to sell their homes, the labor market must become less flexible and adaptive generally. Even when there are more and better jobs available somewhere else, if you can't sell your house, you may be stuck where you are.

None of this adds up to a dynamic labor force. But I doubt Obama and his ilk care about that at all, as long as enough wealth is being redistributed to maintain people where they sit, and to earn their gratitude for doing that.

The sad thing is that the real estate collapse and the generally crumbling economy are both products of government intrusion and distortion of markets. The lesson that Obama draws from this experience, deep thinker that he is, is that government intervention into the economy was simply of insufficient scale and scope to work like it should have.

Stuck on Stupid

Question:  Is it preferable that people (1) Spend their money in the marketplace on the things and services they desire; or (2) Invest their money to make it available to private enterprise to grow the economy in response to market demand; or (3) Have their money confiscated by government planners to redistribute via an endlessly-expanding list of projects and favored constituencies?

Common sense favors some combination of (1) and (2).  The Political Class, though, will always favor #3 because it maximizes their power, with ideological cover provided by some doctrine of "fairness." Call that a clever disguise.  But if there is anything in economics that qualifies as an Iron Law, it is that this path eventually ends in economic ruin.

Those who resist believing that once pointed hopefully to Marxist experiments in Eastern Europe, but those collapsed in every possible way and are no longer mentioned in polite company. Then it was the post-World War II Western European model of social democracy, the "European Social Contract," that would stand as the shining, morally-superior alternative. That's the one currently falling apart in a hail of unemployment, debt, rocks, bottles, and tear gas.

Just thinking outside the box for a moment, maybe we should try what has always worked and has repeatedly proven to be, by far, and on multiple continents and in multiple cultural contexts, the greatest wealth-generating system ever devised -- Free market capitalism under a minimally intrusive government.

But in the Age of Obama? Our brave class warrior? President Head-Full-of-Mush?  Not a chance.

Byron

Record-setting

Hold that space on Mt. Rushmore...

“Sobering isn’t it? It’s an unmitigated litany of failure, evidence of economic illiteracy, political incompetence, and ideological extremism. What a legacy.”


Shut up, he explained

Tennessee does it right

Tennessee's state agencies told to prepare for 5 percent cuts

"NASHVILLE — State Finance Commissioner Mark Emkes has told state government agencies to prepare for a 5 percent reduction in their state funding for next year and not to propose any new programs unless they can save an equal amount with cuts elsewhere."

Imagine a 5% across-the-board cut in every kind and variety of Federal spending; every program, every agency, all of it from A to Z, no excuses and no exceptions.  Imagine the outrage of the bureaucrats and agency heads, of the public employee unions, of the favored constituencies and interest groups.  Imagine the weeping and rending of garments.  Pure music.

As a practical matter, across-the-board cuts are the only kind that make sense.  Anything else opens the door to endless political haggling and horse trading, with the result that after long delays there ends up being very little in the way of actual cuts, just a lot of anger and complaining about "unfairness."  Proposals about "targeted cuts" are therefore essentially unserious, and thus very much preferred to anything across-the-board.

Why is Nashville so much more serious than Washington?  Or is Nashville just smarter?

Byron