Bold Leadership

I'm on vacation and have been following the debt ceiling impasse in a semi-detached manner. Tuning in on the tube this morning I saw that President Obama held another press conference today. He announced that we are getting close to a government shutdown and there should be a bipartisan solution. Really? I mean who would have thought of these novel concepts? From whence does this fount of wisdom flow? Seriously, I thought Presidents were supposed to lead. Silly me! The Ship of State is foundering and all this guy can do is shout "Bail faster!" Oh, and use a fire hose to spray more water on board in the form of humungous deficits at the same time. It is no great surprise that the economy is tanking. How much more Presidential "leadership" can we take?

If It is Broke, Fix It.

Social Security is going broke. Interestingly, it was going broke before it ever paid a dime out and the government knew it. I have cited below a fascinating story about the creation of Social Security by the Roosevelt Administration and the fact that they had projections in hand in the 1930s that the system would be broke by 1980 and require more taxes. They were close on their projections - it was 1983 when new taxes were added - but the salient point is that Social Security's "lockbox" isn't locked at all.

None of us have a little savings account deep in the bowels of the Social Security Administration where our personal payroll deductions are faithfully and safely held and invested. No, it's a transfer tax from working people to retired people. The more benefits the politicians pile on to get reelected, the faster the transfer amount is depleted and the sooner new taxes have to be added to keep the system solvent and/or benefits have cut. The really nasty problem is what happens when the number of retired folks swells but the workforce goes down because of a low birthrate? What happens is Greece. And it is now happening here too.

The old adage still rigorously applies - there is no such thing as a free lunch. If a country's people and its government forget this principle it is only a matter if time before the whole system begins to spin out of control until it just stops. Then, who knows?  If it's broke, let's quit kidding ourselves that anything is "free" and fix it.

finance.townhall.com/columnists/johnransom/2011/07/23/social_security_broke_at_the_beginning

The Kudzu Economy

On January 14, 2010 I wrote that the Democrats are like kudzu - they deform the political and economic landscape like the kudzu-encrusted forest shown in the picture. There should not be much doubt in anyone's mind at this point that this is true. How's that hopey-changey thang working for you, if you are working at all?

Congress is now debating raising the debt ceiling. It will be raised, but the price exacted had better be serious budget cutting over the next 10 years. If we don't, the kudzu will continue to increase on the economy and we will continue to have sputtering, flat economic growth and the traditional American dream will recede further and further for all of us. It doesn't have to be this way. 

Why Banks Are in Trouble

Here is a posting from an Oregon attorney on a specialty website for estate attorneys that helps explain why banks are in trouble. It mirrors incidents that I have experienced while working on cases. See what you think.

"I represent a solvent estate.  After the PR was appointed, we found a monthly statement from a local bank regarding a credit card balance.  I replied to the statment address, stating that I needed to know the balance without late fees after the date of death.  Also notified them of the probate.  I told them that as soon as I received the corrected statement, they would be paid.  I heard nothing.

The following month, I got another statement from the same bank, with added finance charges, but the statement was from a different address (different state, in fact).  I sent another letter, with copies of the first letter. Nothing heard.

The third month, another statement came.  Same bank, different state.  I tried calling, but their telephone system began going in a circle.  Sent another letter.

A week later, I got a call from a credit collection company.  The collection company called me on a business line in the same building, but not my law office line.  It was by accident that I answered the telephone.  The said they were representing the bank and wanted to settle for 70 cents on the dollar of the original debt.  I confirmed they were legit and had them send me a fax.  I had authorization to pay the debt, which I did.

So, in the end, a solvent estate offered to pay the full amount of the debt on three different occasions.  We were thwarted by a collection company that insisted on being paid 70% of the debt.  So, I figure the bank got half of that, which is 35%, when they could have done nothing and received the full amount."

This is not exactly rocket science. Well, maybe it is. Sheesh.

(Tip o' the hat to Ray Ramsay)

Installation Error

INSTALLING SALEM/KEIZER SUMMER.....
███████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 44% DONE.
Install delayed....please wait.
Installation failed. Please try again. 404 error: Season not found. Season "Summer" cannot be located. The season you are looking for might have been removed, had it's name changed, or is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.

(Tip o' the hat to Jeanine Rieff)

In Praise of Hanging Out

Americans are too busy. Even when they're not officially busy, they are busy with computers, cell phones, iPads, iPods, Wii, DVRs, DVDs - well, you get the point. We seem to have lost as a nation the ability to just hang out with each other and that's too bad because that is where real relationships happen.

A wise man I know said that he builds in lots of "porch time" with people he knows and likes. When family or friends get together today, it is like uploading a burst of data to your flash drive: what we've been doing, where we've been, who is doing what, etc. Hurry, hurry, hurry! That's all well and good as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough. Typically our thoughts and feelings don't come out in one fast and smooth burst. What we are really thinking and feeling takes time to come out, as opposed to merely what we have been doing.  We first have to decide if we want to share. If we do, then we bring it out in bits and pieces and assess how the other person is receiving it. Often, we don't know how we feel about it ourselves and are processing even as we talk. As we allow the conversation to ebb and flow, though, with someone we appreciate and who appreciates us, we can be pleasantly surprised at the destination once when we get there.

All of this takes time - enough time to let the conversations happen naturally and to let them be punctuated by silences. Allow for some "porch time" in your life. Go hang out with somebody you care about and enjoy the luxury of silences and the good conversations that will eventually flow. This is what makes life rich.

Howdy from Near Alaska!

Greetings from Near Alaska. It's July 18 and we have mushrooms in our yard. We have not been watering. In northeast Oregon there was snow in the pass between Elgin and Enterprise this weekend. That hasn't happened in anybody's memory alive today. We went for a walk last night and several people had fires going in their fireplaces. I know that much of the rest of the U.S. is sweltering in a brutal heatwave. Condolences. C'mon down - we've got room for you in Near Alaska! [Ed. note - Portland is equidistant from Anchorage and Chicago.]

SeaPort Flies Into the Sunset

We were flying home on Tuesday evening and caught a connecting flight in Salt Lake City back to Portland. It was a beautiful clear night and as we let down over the Great Salt Lake we flew past the airport and saw the myriad Delta flights lined up at their gates. This brought back memories of 3 years ago coming in from Baltimore and catching a connecting flight directly to Salem. What a pleasant flight, especially the part about being met at the airport and then a 5 minute drive home. Those were the days! "But," I thought, "there's always SeaPort." Little did I know.

I picked up the back newspapers when we got home et voila, no SeaPort. Was ist los? It seems that the subsidy from Newport ran out and so did SeaPort. Salem got caught in the middle. I wasn't sure about the fit for Salem in my April 2 post welcoming them, but I am a little surprised that they stayed less than 3 months before pulling the plug. It's unfortunate for Salem because it will make it even harder to attract an airline. This area can support airline service if it goes to the right places, connects into a large system, and is competitively priced. The future isn't much better for SeaPort. It is clearly just chasing subsidies. In the Federal budget reductions that will likely be coming soon, the Essential Airline Service (EAS) subsidies are almost certainly a goner and alas, when that happens, so is SeaPort. Sic transit gloria.

www.statesmanjournal.com/article/20110712/NEWS/107120330/-1/7daysarchives/Another-airline-skips-town

Whacking the Barbary Pirates

Thomas Jefferson did better against Libya than Obama is doing. The Barbary  pirates from Libya were attacking merchant shipping along the coast of North Africa. President Jefferson ordered in the Marines, who promptly smacked the bad guys at Tripoli in 1805. President Obama isn't having such a decisive result.

Victor Davis Hanson writes about the progress of the "war." Although NATO has been playing soldier for 4 months and keeps issuing press releases that Gaddafi will be throwing in the towel any day now, there he sits thumbing his nose at the West. This apparently is the rarefied view of war as now practiced by the Europeans and Democratic administrations here in the U.S.  

My friend, George McGreer, loaned me a book (Over the Beach) about the Navy's role in the air war in Vietnam. At the end of the book one of the pilots makes the following point:

"If you make the terrible decision to go to war, you must be willing to tell people the truth- that war is a nasty, mean, shitty business... You either do it or you don't. And if you do, you go to win, pure and simple. You don't send intellectualized threats or signals to your enemy to persuade him to change his ways. He'll be kicking your ass in the meantime."

Good advice Mr. President. Right now it's Pirates 1 NATO 0. Let's do it or get out of Dodge.

townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2011/07/14/a_dumb_and_dumber_war_in_libya

How Bad Can It Get?

Yahoo moved a Time.com article entitled, "The Euro Crisis: How Much Worse Can It Get?" You're kidding right? This is the type of question that gets asked by someone who is ignorant of history, whose event horizon goes back a year or two and whose ability to track trends logically into the future extends maybe 15-20 minutes. Let's talk about the inter-war period in much of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s: breadlines, worldwide economic depression, huge social dislocation. The picture shows money being swept up in the streets because it is worthless. All of these conditions set the stage for the rise of Fascists into power. Remember Hitler and Mussolini? That's how bad it can get! Economies aren't toys to be used and abused. Real people get real hurt. Get a clue!

news.yahoo.com/euro-crisis-much-worse-103507347.html

True to Form

The headline on Yahoo this afternoon is "Analysis: Flat jobs data signal weakest recovery in decades" and the sub-headline is "The job market is defying history." My response is "true" and "bullpucky."

The "true" part is self evident as the lowest curve on the chart attests. The chart tracks the in/out for recessions going back to 1949 and the Obama curve is on the bottom and sort of floundering down there. The reason for both is the same: Keynesian economics.

If you go back to the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Roosevelt Administration tried the same thing that the Obama Administration is doing now - pumping enormous public expenditures into the economy. The result is the same, e.g. - nearly flat economic growth and anemic to the point of nil jobs added. It took WWII to pull the U.S. economy out of the doldrums. Hopefully that won't be necessary now.

The more typical pattern since the Great Depression for recessions is a steep curve in and a steep curve out.  That's because the government has kept its hands off the market corrections and once the market got the particular problem out of its system, the economy recovered. Reagan, for example, came in after the disaster of the Carter years and cut taxes and regulations. Within a year the economy was in a healthy climb that didn't stop until 1990 or so and there was only a mild correction at that time.

The clear conclusion is that Keynesian economics don't work. The more the government interferes, the longer the economy will stay bad and even get worse. Politicians, especially Democrats, love to think that they can defy the laws of economics. Right. We are getting an exceptionally harsh lesson right now in the error of that belief. Government has been the problem with galloping deficits, forcing unsupportable easy money policies on the lending industry, and playing footsie with all sorts of high rollers on Wall Street. It's time for a change and the sooner the better. Democrats and Republicans who don't understand this need to go.

Hezbollah in this Hemisphere

The "brand name" that most Americans associate with terrorism is al Qaeda. After a decade of being relentlessly pursued by the U.S. after 9/11, al Qaeda's ability to mount a large scale operation has been very seriously eroded. A new brand has quietly eclipsed them and it now has extensive operations in this hemisphere.

Hezbollah is a serious terrorist operation that operates as an arm of the government of Iran. While the Mad Mullahs cannot strike the United States with a conventional military attack, Hezbollah has the ability to do so via terror attacks. This group killed 241 Marines in a Lebanon truck bombing in1983 and hit the U.S. embassy in Beirut as well. Like a python, they are trying to encircle Israel and strangle it with incessant terrorist raids and occasional rocket barrages. Now they are operating all over Latin America and along the Mexican border - something to keep in mind when thinking about the non-enforcement policy by this Administration along our southern border. If things heat up with Iran as it goes nuclear, you can reasonably expect to see the "Hezbollah" brand stamped all over the next terrorist spectacular in this country.

 townhall.com/columnists/katiepavlich/2011/07/08/a_growing_terror_threat_hezbollah_in_latin_america

Riding the Seesaw

It's funny how small things can tip the balance of power. This may be one of them.

Rare-earth elements are a key component in many high tech products like lasers, flat screens, night vision goggles, and the like. China currently produces 97% of the world's supply and has not hesitated to play games with supplying them when it is in its interest to do so. As the world moves further into the high tech era, this has given China great leverage over potential rivals. Until now.

Huge deposits of rare-earth elements have been discovered on the ocean floor. Although it will be a technological feat to commercially mine the deposits, it can be done and thus we can expect the playing field to be leveled for access to these important commodities. Political power follows economic power and thus China's hold on the 21st century becomes not quite as firm as before - a good thing for the rest of us.

news.yahoo.com/ocean-floor-muddies-chinas-grip-21st-century-gold-183205516.html

A Sight for Sore Eyes

How I miss The Gipper - let me count the ways! With a sunny optimism and a fierce determination, Reagan led the United States out of the malaise of the Carter years and rallied the nation into becoming a confident juggernaut that gained economic strength and finished off the Soviet Union in 1989.

It is the celebration of his 100th birthday and it isn't just Americans that recognize his contributions to freedom. Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and England are celebrating too with statues in his honor. Today, July 4, our friends the Brits are dedicating his statue at Grosvenor Square, near one of Dwight Eisenhower, and holding a dinner tonight to fondly remember his contribution to world peace. He and Prime Minister Thatcher had a warm relationship and it was their steadfastness, along with Pope John Paul II, that eventually led to the Soviet Union falling into the dustbin of history. Reagan was an American to be sure, but as these testimonies attest, he was also a man of the world in a way that President Obama cannot even imagine. I hope that as I write these words a man or woman of similar character is responding to our country's call. Character counts.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304450604576419831576048472.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLESecond

We Hold These Truths

 Chuck Colson, Breakpoint, 7/4/11

The American Creed
"We Hold These Truths..."

July 04, 2011

The great British intellectual G. K. Chesterton wrote that “America is the only nation in the world that is founded on [a] creed.”

Think about that for a moment. Other nations were founded on the basis of race, or by the power of kings or emperors who accumulated lands -- and the peasants who inhabited those lands.

But America was -- and is to this day -- different. It was founded on a shared belief. Or as Chesterton said, on a creed.

And what is that creed that sets us apart? It is the eloquent, profound, and simple statement penned by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

I’ll never forget when I graduated from Brown University during the Korean War. I couldn’t wait to become a Marine officer, to give my life if necessary, to defend that creed. To defend the idea that our rights come from God Himself and are not subject to whims of governments or tyrants. That humans ought to be free to pursue their most treasured hopes and aspirations.

Perhaps some 230 years later, we take these words for granted. But in 1776, they were earth-shaking, indeed, revolutionary.

Yet today, they are in danger of being forgotten altogether.  According to Gallup, 66 percent of American adults have no idea that the words, “We hold these truths . . .” come from the Declaration of Independence. Even worse, only 45 percent of college seniors know that the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are proclaimed in the Declaration.

As America grows more and more diverse culturally, religiously, ethnically, it is critical that we embrace the American creed. Yes, America has always been a “melting pot.” But what is the pot that holds our multicultural stew together? Chesterton said the pot’s “original shape was traced on the lines of Jeffersonian democracy.” A democracy founded on those self-evident truths expressed in the Declaration of Independence. And as Chesterton remarked “The pot must not melt.”

Abraham Lincoln understood this so well. For him, the notion that all men are created equal was “the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”

So go to the Fourth of July parade. Go to the neighborhood barbecue and enjoy the hot dogs and apple pie.

But here’s an idea for you. Why not take time out at the picnic to read the Declaration of Independence aloud with your friends and neighbors.

Listen -- and thrill -- to those words that bind us together as a nation of freedom-loving people: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

These are the words that Americans live for -- and if necessary, die for. 

www.breakpoint.org/bpcommentaries/entry/13/17385