On the Fiscal Cliff

Thomas Sowell expresses his thoughts about the Fiscal Cliff, and these portions echo exactly what I think and feel:

First of all, despite all the melodrama about raising taxes on "the rich," even if that is done it will scarcely make a dent in the government's financial problems. Raising the tax rates on everybody in the top two percent will not get enough additional tax revenue to run the government for ten days.

No previous administration in the entire history of the nation ever finished the year with a trillion dollar deficit. The Obama administration has done so every single year.

Referring to the Federal Reserve System's creation of hundreds of billions of new dollars out of thin air as "quantitative easing" makes it seem as if this is some soothing and esoteric process, rather than amounting essentially to nothing more than printing more money.
Debasing the value of money by creating more of it is nothing new or esoteric. Irresponsible governments have done this, not just for centuries, but for thousands of years.
It is a way to take people's wealth from them without having to openly raise taxes. Inflation is the most universal tax of all.

But it is not the same politically, so long as gullible people don't look beyond words to the reality that inflation taxes everybody, the poorest as well as the richest.

And there are these nuggets from Part 2:

A key lie that has been repeated over and over, largely unanswered, is that President Bush's "tax cuts for the rich" cost the government so much lost tax revenue that this added to the budget deficit-- so that the government cannot afford to allow the cost of letting the Bush tax rates continue for "the rich."

What is remarkable is how easy it is to show how completely false Obama's argument is.

What both the statistical tables in the "Economic Report of the President" and the graphs in Investor's Business Daily show is that (1) tax revenues went up-- not down-- after tax rates were cut during the Bush administration, and (2) the budget deficit declined, year after year, after the cut in tax rates that have been blamed by Obama for increasing the deficit.  

And here are the table and images referred to above:

The Importance of Knowing Where We Are

As I read this quote, I wondered if most Americans truly know where we are as a nation, where they are as individuals and the impact they can have in the culture and economy at large.

"As for blame, who can be blamed for inheriting a culture that existed before they were born?  But, while nothing can be done about the past, much can be done in the present to prepare for the future. Whatever we wish to achieve in the future, it must begin by knowing where we are in the present- not where we wish we were, or where we wish others to think we are, but where we are in fact." - Thomas Sowell in Economic Facts and Fallacies, p186

We Meet to Meet

"When an organization has more of its decisions made by committees, that gives more influence to those who have more time available to attend committee meetings and to drag out each meeting longer. In other words, it reduces the influence of those who have work to do, and are doing it, while making those who are less productive more influential." - Thomas Sowell

I have found this to be incredibly true.

If you look around your company, you can probably identify several people who seem to be on all sorts of project teams or committees or groups or whatever they may be called at your place of employment.

The natural response to recognizing this fact is usually "How do they have time for all of that?".

The answer to that question is quite simple: they either don't have enough work to do or they don't do the work they are supposed to do, usually pushing it off onto other people.

The sad thing is that managers love to see people who are "great team members" running from meeting to meeting to meeting and are so busy. Although they might never accomplish a single thing of significant value, the effort and time involved in those meetings is valued far greater than the value of the person with his head down in the cubicle cranking out work that adds to the bottom line of the company. In fact, more often times than not, the person in the cube is also carrying the workload of the meeting monster next door.

It's a shame that managers who love to meet for the sake of meeting breed people who meet for the same reason. Meetings do not get work done. While it is useful to pull groups together from time to time to strategize how the workload will get completed, most meetings that are on the schedules of many employees are not helpful and add little, if any, value to the bottom line of the company.

So managers - Kill the meetings and get back to allowing your employees to do some real work. Hold your employees equally accountable for the work that they are accomplishing, not the work they are talking about doing someday.

That is what the employee in the cubicle would love to tell you.

Why I Think America Is In Deep Trouble

Last week I was thinking about all of the hype surrounding the debt-ceiling when it occurred to me that I haven't check the status of the Federal Reserve's Monetary Base lately. What follows is a lengthy post where I try to recapture all of my thoughts on this and various topics that I have written about over the course of the past few years.

I started tracking the Monetary Base prior to attending the April 15, 2009 Tea Party in downtown St. Louis, after which I posted my reasons for attending the tea party event. Included in that post was a graph showing the National Debt Per Capita and the Adjusted Monetary Base.

Federal Government Intervention

Here's another snippet from another great article from Thomas Sowell:

The idea that the federal government has to step in whenever there is a downturn in the economy is an economic dogma that ignores much of the history of the United States.

During the first hundred years of the United States, there was no Federal Reserve. During the first one hundred and fifty years, the federal government did not engage in massive intervention when the economy turned down.

No economic downturn in all those years ever lasted as long as the Great Depression of the 1930s, when both the Federal Reserve and the administrations of Hoover and of FDR intervened.

The myth that has come down to us says that the government had to intervene when there was mass unemployment in the 1930s. But the hard data show that there was no mass unemployment until after the federal government intervened. Yet, once having intervened, it was politically impossible to stop and let the economy recover on its own. That was the fundamental problem then-- and now.

I wish the federal government would just step away from this area.
It seems that doing nothing to "help" is the greatest aid in the recovery process.

Economic Recovery Hinges on One Word

"One of the biggest obstacles to economic recovery is that politicians and the media are both focused on how government can MAKE the economy recover, rather than on how it can LET the economy recover. One of the biggest deterrents to investments, and the jobs they could create, is uncertainty as to what new bright idea will come out of Washington to change the rules in midstream." - Thomas Sowell

Gun-ControL Laws Can Be Repealed, If Need Be

Thomas Sowell writes the following about Gun-Control Laws:

When you stop and think about it, there is no obvious reason why issues like gun control should be ideological issues in the first place. It is ultimately an empirical question whether allowing ordinary citizens to have firearms will increase or decrease the amount of violence.

...
If the end of gun control leads to a bloodbath of runaway shootings, then the Second Amendment can be repealed, just as other constitutional amendments have been repealed. Laws exist for people, not people for laws.

Everything He Needs

"Whether Barack Obama is simply incompetent as President or has some hidden agenda to undermine this country, at home and abroad, he has nearly everything he needs to ruin America, including a fool for a Vice President." - Thomas Sowell

What is Public Service?

Thomas Sowell writes to college students who want to change the world and tells them what real public service looks like:

You want to see more people have better housing? Build it! Become a builder or developer -- if you can stand the sneers and disdain of your classmates and professors who regard the very words as repulsive.

Would you like to see more things become more affordable to more people? Then figure out more efficient ways of producing things or more efficient ways of getting those things from the producers to the consumers at a lower cost.
...
Those who have helped the poor the most have not been those who have gone around loudly expressing "compassion" for the poor, but those who found ways to make industry more productive and distribution more efficient, so that the poor of today can afford things that the affluent of yesterday could only dream about.

Economics and Health Care

I found the chapter entitled "The Economics of Medical Care" in Thomas Sowell's book Applied Economics to be incredibly informative and a helpful presentation of facts versus myths in the healh care discussion. For example:

Fourty percent of uninsured Americans are under the age of 25 and more than 60 percent are under the age of 35. Fewer than 10 percent of people over 55 are uninsured, despite the widespread political use of an image of old people who have to choose between food and medical care. This may be the political image of the uninsured, but it is hardly the reality. - p67

The Politics of Economics

Because I have never taken a course in it, but have become more interested in it, I have recently begun reading through a book on economics. I picked it up at the library because I had a desire to learn more about economics. I knew nothing of the author and picked the book because it was praised for being easy to understand and readable. Not until I began reading the book did I discover that the very first chapter in the book is entitled "Politics versus Economics".