Eric’s Blog

Remember political correctness? Such a marvelous concatenation of words to arrive at a new meaning. It allowed an arbiter of political speech to move beyond points of view or the morality of right and wrong and advance directly to the more civilized grading scale or correct and incorrect. Free speech has always been messy, social interactions awkward and political interactions contentious. In one fell swoop it was all cleared up by the elite effete ethical direction of vastly more enlightened New York blueblooded intellectuals.

I thought all was well, but now it turns out we need social justice, economic justice, racial justice and a whole bunch o’ fairness too. I feel so intellectually moribund amongst all these petulant new forms of justice. I thought there was one kind of justice. In fact I even believed there was justice for all. Shows what I knew! How could there possibly be justice for all until we divided everybody into their groups and categorized all the forms of justice that need to be dispensed. It’s all very confusing, but if you are old school like me and trying to fathom all this new speak I can clear it up for you in simple terms. The message being sent to you is shut the hell up you racist homophobe. I mean if you don’t understand all the justices and fairnessess being dispensed this is at least one way to summarize that you are almost certainly intended to be silent, confused and intimidated for the purposes of social justice.

I believe however that there is an opportunity here. I don’t recall seeing the concatenation of political justice. Oh goody! I get to define one of these. It’s like finding a really good domain name like IAteYourUnicorn.garlic or something. Ready? Here we go…

Political justice means that the “man”, you know the oppressor class, has us down and needs to be politically punished. I think first we must define political injustice. If a political class or entity behaves in such a way to remove liberty or otherwise demagogue and offend others that is unjust. For instance calling people racist who oppose you because you have no good ideas to counter theirs is politically unjust. Likewise spending their grandchildren into a banana republic, pandering to aggressor nations, taxing excessively and looking for more. Hey, it’s my idea and I get to decide what justice is. After all that is why we have hate crimes, because we already had crimes before but now we categorize them by what is in people’s hearts… which we have to interpret. So it’s all very imprecise.

So political justice is very simple. Those in the government committing political injustice, trampling the constitution and violating our trust, they are unjust. Political justice dictates they must stand in the public square and repeat aloud I am a spineless commie loving Euro trash soft socialist and I want to turn the country into a weak and pitiful mess where we share in the equal distribution of poverty and misery. I’m giving George Soros his money back and I’m going to get a real job in the real world and stop leaching off the public dole and voting myself raises.

Of course this won’t happen, so political justice will just have to be keeping the country from turning into Greece by voting the bastards out and voting in people with the spine to fix the mess and turn the country around. One thing is for sure… voters will get what they deserve, so this time make sure to explain to your friends what a V.A.T. is and why everything will cost 10% to 20% more overnight and what it means when your currency collapses and your government can no longer pay to keep it’s doors open. Maybe there is only one justice, but if there is any justice in this world the United States of America will heed the words of Vladimir Putin and do something about it’s socialism problem and heed the words of the Chinese and do something about out economy. Hint, it’s not happening with the clowns we have running the government now!

Today I celebrate a birthday and I’m almost old enough to throw my hands up and say everyone else can worry about their messes. To my friends who are celebrating a glorious victory for our exalted leader, I love you. Enjoy the moment, much as a young man would after marrying a woman he hardly knows. As my grandfather used to say, marry in haste, repent in leisure. She may seem beautiful the day after, but give it a few years and you might be trying to slit your wrists with a rusty tin can lid. If you don’t believe me that our elected representatives haven’t read the bill just search youtube for Jason Matera who has interviewed a number of congressmen and asked them about specific paragraphs in the bill like rehabilitation for sex offenders. There have also been admissions of this being socialism and our president, while mocking the opposition, said it was a step toward universal health care. You might like the idea but I don’t see why I should be forced to do what you want and I certainly think our president should be our president, not your president mocking me. I wouldn’t mock you. Mocking presidents is a long tradition made easier when they demean the office.

Right after this bill was signed we found that the pre-existing conditions for children is not an immediate benefit even though the president repeatedly said it was. Oops. I guess they didn’t read that. This last week we found out that various companies are going to be out some money because of the bill. Mark Steyn does a nice piece which leaves me feeling ill and wishing he were not so damned smart and perceptive. The key factor here is a footnote adjusting a tax incentive to help companies cover retirees for prescriptions. It costs us $665 per person and they decided to bump it up to the 35% corporate tax rate. Hell Sweden only has 26.3%. Sweden! If these companies dump these people into medicare the cost per person for us jumps to $1,200. AT&T estimates it will cost them $1 billion but the total first-quarter hit to S&P 500 firms will be $4.5 billion according to the Wall Street Journal. Companies are considering what to do. One company that produces medical equipment is looking at laying off as many as 1,000 people. In case you don’t know, companies aren’t really designed to absorb all new costs. They either minimize them or pass them on to us.

This is where I point out a big problem with the congressional budget office when they scored this bill for cost. You see they do what congress asks them and they use something called static scoring. What’s that you ask? Well it assumes that no matter what you do tax wise it will have no effect. For instance let’s say you asked them to tell you how much money you would get raising the top marginal tax rate 25% on everyone making $1 million a year. That’s $250,000 more in revenue per person, right? Suppose at $1.5 million a year you are at 75% but at $800,000 a year you are at 50% Nearly doubling your income nets you $375,000 instead of $400,000 for a loss of $25,000. The argument for soaking the rich is that they can afford it. Let me ask you a question. If you could make more money producing half as much why would you hire the extra people and bust your ass? This is why the Laffer curve explains optimal tax revenues are obtained well below the soak the rich level.

And here is where out problem gets ugly, because if companies want to save that $4.5 billion in taxes they dump those people into medicare and that makes over $4 billion in additional costs. That spread is over a $9.5 billion dollar error due to the insane premise of static scoring. So why use it? Well with dynamic scoring you have to make additional judgments and it’s more work with supposedly less certainty. However any rational person understands the truth. If this kind of error is showing up while we’re still in the honeymoon and the CBO needed to multiply their original estimate for medicare by nine times things aren’t so good. Especially when we are in so much debt that by 2018 our interest will be more than we spend on defense, $800 billion. Of course that assumes that somebody will still be loaning us money and that our AAA rating won’t be gone which will more than double that interest payment. By 2020 America will look like a 1971 Oldsmobile pinging, surging and trailing the think white smoke of motor oil leaving everyone watching wondering when it will seize up and stop. It’s already not looking so great.

If you are still drunk on the thrill of making us into a European disaster you might be angry at those companies for crashing your party. After all they can afford to lose money… lay people off, things like that. I can tell you that representatives Henry Waxman and Bart Stupak are upset. So upset in fact they have written to the heads of these companies with an invitation to appear at congressional hearings. That’s never fun, but hey… Here’s what you need to keep in mind. Those companies are required by law to publicly declare such losses when they are aware of them. Yeah, it’s called Sarbanes Oxely and ironically it has made it so expensive and complex to do business that the next year after it was advanced tech companies going public nearly stopped. In fairness it was right after the dot com bubble burst, but it added substantially to the cost of going public. The point is, people are now going to be harassed by congress for adhering to a law congress wrote that makes it more expensive to do business over exposing another law congress wrote makes it more expensive to do business.

For those people who lament we are losing our manufacturing base and jobs are being shipped overseas I submit to you it is not greed causing this. Why the hell would you leave the most educated and talented workforce in the world where you can maintain complete control unless you had to do so for fiscally defensive reasons? So let’s consider the issue of static scoring and ask ourselves the simple question. How many other stupid decisions made by congress are making it more difficult for business. You can say they are all evil and to be honest I’m not overly fond of the big faceless corporation. In fact I’d rather get a root canal without anesthetic than try to fit into the corporate world… But I do understand economics.

Recently we got some growth numbers, but it looks like our projected growth for the remainder of the year is around 3%. Ordinarily that would not be bad, but to realize a 1% drop in unemployment this year we would need 5%. Oops! And in some places over a third of home mortgages are under water. Remember how we got here? So skipping over the debt rant and going to jobs we need to see about 100,000 hires a month to stay even with population growth and we’re still negative. If we were to see a 1% decline it would still leave us between 8% and 9%, closer to 9%. When we sunk $860 billion into a stimulus that Joe Biden keeps telling us is working we were approaching 7% and we were told we wouldn’t go over 8%. The presidents office of management and budget says… no appreciable decline in unemployment for the next 2-3 years. What are we doing?

One of the most amazing things I’ve heard in the last year is our president saying that jobs and the economy are tied to health care. This week we find out he is right. Clearly we can already see more jobs going away, more debt being accrued and more doctors leaving the profession, with something near 80% less excited about medicine. Do you even want to know where they said they would get the rest of the money or how much it would really cost? Remember your household owes something like $400,000 for entitlements right now next to the $60,000 in government debt. If you have children this is where you look at them and hang your head in shame and apologize… then tell them to get a good job and pay your medicare!

The thing that strikes me as most blatant is the hypocrisy of calling in head of companies reporting losses under SOX as they must by law simply because the Democrats in those house committees don’t like what they are saying… that they have to say by law. Gut check. Do those representatives care about the truth and how it affects ordinary Americans, their jobs and our economy… Or are those representatives just throwing a hissy fit over someone exposing the trail of bovine excrement coming from their sacred cows?

Recently I saw the moveon.org Will Ferrell piece about insurance executives. That’s two minutes of my life I’ll never get back. I was a Mad TV fan until it was canceled. Saturday Night Live was funny decades ago, but I remember turning it on in the 90s and seeing lame acts like Will Ferrell in a cheerleader outfit. I never thought I’d see comedy bad enough to give you cancer. In fact the only thing I ever saw him in that was funny was The Producers where he was brilliant. It may have been his first new character to play in decades. When I saw Star Trek this summer there was a preview for a movie about him and another 40 something as step brothers. Come to think of it, he had another movie that was sort of a parody of something so campy… It was like a parody of a parody pitching a really bad movie. So after two minutes of his web ad I was trying to figure out where the funny was and why a rich annoying Hollywood actor dork was lecturing me on people getting paid too much. I was stunned to see that he has been getting paid $20,000,000 a movie. I mean his entire schtick is getting in stupid situations and acting uncomfortable so that really immature, insecure imbeciles and teen aged boys can feel better about themselves because even their dumbest friends are mildly more intelligent. Watching my fingernails grow would be less tedious. In Shakespeare’s time a comedy was a play where the protagonist doesn’t die. In a Will Ferrell movie comedy is where you wish the protagonist would die 15 minutes in.

I remember being told the secret of wealth years ago. Serve the classes and live with the masses, serve the masses and live with the classes. Wealth is built on pennies. Look at it this way. If you came up with something so cool 10% of all Americans had to have it and whatever it cost you got 10¢ each you would get $32,000,000. If you got 15¢ and people bought it monthly you would get over half a million dollars a year. To the unenlightened capitalist this is the reward for serving many people well. After all everyone chooses freely whether or not to spend their money with you or your competitors. Anyway that was the theory before government hid the cheese in a maze of tax code and regulation, but how much money you make for serving others was never anyones business. Of course today we know these failed ideas are not just quaint memories, but evil incarnate. Profit means stealing candy from babies and wearing swastikas. Shame on you for wanting to get rich, but keep playing the lottery… also known as the voluntary tax on the mathematically challenged.

Today if you make too much money it is entirely unfair to everyone who didn’t make as much as you. Never mind that they already got what they want, they should get your money too. Sure it was just nickels and dimes, which are meaningless to us, but when they add up to millions we want our share! The only way to take it from those evil rich is to have the government take it. I read recently that the thinking behind socialist utopia is that it’s unfair to have a small part of the population have so much power, so the solution is to empower an even smaller part of the population, the government, to have total control over our lives. Right now our beloved congressional Democrats are trying to figure out how to make this new and ingenius idea work with health care. Without enough of other people’s money utopia turns to distopia and government has to shake down the middle class of our caste system.

So we need to identify the evil rich people we want to punish for providing us things we chose to buy who kept some small part of our money. Of course the rich pay the government a lot more than 10% of their money. More like half but it’s important to point out that government has low overhead, like 4% while businesses have expensive profits, like 30%. Okay, oil companies actually get by on 8% profit, but we can destroy them after we nuke insurance companies. Please ignore the fact that overhead and profit are not the same things. Also ignore that the average government job pays 80% more than private sector jobs and and along with gold plated benefits has six figure pensions in as little as 30 years. Also ignore that government waste and corruption is about 100 times the level of companies that need to make a profit. Companies can only profit by keeping costs down and competing… Government doesn’t have to worry about evil profits so costs are irrelevant and best of all it’s all paid for with those evil profits we take from those terrible people collecting pennies for serving us.

Oops, back in that old think. We’re fundamentally transforming America so we have to think new. The biggest problem with health care reform is the 53 or so new agencies we need to create which means tens of thousands of new high paying jobs and pensions. That’s good news if you’ve been schmoozing with the ruling class. The president says this has to be paid for! This is where Will Ferrell gave me an idea. Recent surveys show nearly 90% of America thinks the press is in the tank for our current administration and I bet you can’t name 10 Hollywood stars who aren’t cheerleading for far left causes. Movies make billions of dollars a year. I smell a plan. You see every fiber of my body says Will Ferrell is making too much money at $20,000,000 a film. In fact I bet a lot of people want their money back. While I’d like to flog everybody with a wet noodle who went to see the moron’s films, I think the “new think” way to do this is to have the government just take what we all know he doesn’t deserve. My proposal is to take everything over $100,000 a year if he makes a movie. Don’t think of it as a tax, it’s more of a humanitarian gesture for the rest of us. Also the studios should be limited to 4% profit and turn over the rest as an homage to their political message.

Don’t look at me like that. This is a brilliant plan. Hollywood is already on this bus. They are full of self righteous propagandists consumed with self loathing and guilt over their money. Don’t think of it as a government takeover of Hollywood. Think of it as reforming Hollywood’s greedy no talent stars and vapid uninspired studios, whose best idea is comic book pictures and parodies of campy TV so bad it looked like a parody. Not much will change. Oliver Stone can still make romance movies about Chavez and maybe one about George Bush contracting with Nixon on Wall Street to hit JFK. We all know that’s what happened anyway. Michael Moore can still say capitalism is failed and we can mete out justice by taking his money. Barack Obama can star in a movie which will should keep him busy enough for months that we can turn on the TV without hearing him rehash the same speech for the hundredth time. Of course if the movie is out before we seat a new congress it will be mandatory to see, but free with your national health care card. Hollywood reform would pay for Cadillac health care for everyone while paying ridiculously high salaries and pensions to tens of thousands of new government workers in dozens of new federal agencies. To honor Will Farrell for his part in my health care financing idea I nominate we rename proctology to WillFarrellOlogy. It’s only fair that we honor the center of his wit in this proposal.