Dysfunctional Economy

How Much Was The Russia Thing Worth To Rachel Maddow?

Posted on by jccarlton

A lot, apparently. Enough that Ms. Maddow and the MSNBC writers who night after night spun a tale that was supposed to end the Trump Presidency kept after it with new salacious accusations, hints and insinuations nigh after night all the while keeping just one side of making any comment that actually required evidence. This is typical:
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/documents-show-trump-practice-of-misrepresenting-his-wealth-1467427395950
We are supposed to be amazed that Donald Trump puffs himself up. I have to ask myself, lady, where have you been for the last forty years or so? This would hardly be news to anybody living in the New York area. But there it is, now Trump being Trump is lying and potential criminality.

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Clauses For Little People

Posted on by jccarlton

Amanda over at Mad Genius Cub Ran into another of those things that legal genius’s are putting into contracts for employment or creative work. In this case it is a morality clause. Well at leas that is what the legal genius’s are calling it. What it amounts to is yet another method of the people at the top of heap to avoid having to deal with “controversy.”

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Invasion or Refugees

Posted on by jccarlton

For the last few weeks a ‘caravan’ of people has been marching up to the US from the country of Honduras. The Mainstream media would have us believe that the people in the caravan are refugees from a war torn country fleeing oppression and poverty. The problem with that is that the facts don’t add up.

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Horseshoe Nails.

Posted on by jccarlton

For the last forty years or so, the trend in American politics, culture and the intellectual elites of the country has been to ignore the deindustrialization of the country. In fact the elites have been enablers of the process through polices and behaviors that strangled the industrial companies and their business.

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A Laffer-Curve Relationship between Welfare Spending and Poverty

Posted on by jccarlton

It should be fairly obvious that most of the relationships like taxation and relief distribution are not linear. You don’t get less poverty for the more money you spend and after a point tax revenue declines as the rate down. This should be evident in the fact that in spite of massive manipulations of both relief and welfare neither has been able to create massive increases of revenue or free us from poverty. Yet there is the constant drumbeat to increase taxes and welfare in spite of the obvious destruction that taxes and welfare have created.

They say that insanity is repeating the same things over and over again and expecting a different result. Yet here we are.
https://fee.org/articles/poverty-in-the-us-was-plummeting-until-lyndon-johnson-declared-war-on-it/?utm_source=zapier&utm&fbclid=IwAR0fLfpVwTgqkEDHmgmsCd3lpSv4AQEytA3INgh66wIARKtDXAFkbpP58Ok
As far as a I am concerned, victory in the war on poverty would be nobody needing the relief programs and the programs being shut down. Instead the programs expand and consume ever larger sums of money and effort, with little change in the results.

International Liberty

The welfare state is bad news. It’s bad for taxpayers and it’s bad for recipients.

It’s also bad for the economy since prosperity is in part a function of the quantity of labor that is productively employed. As such, government programs that lure people into dependency obviously reduce national economic output.

We can get a sense of how the nation is being hurt by reviewing some of the scholarly literature.

Writing for the Cato Journal, Lowell Gallaway and Daniel Garrett explore the relationship between redistribution spending and poverty reduction.

They start by pointing out that more welfare spending used to be associated with reductions in poverty. But when President Johnson launched his so-called War on Poverty and dramatically increased the level of redistribution, the link between welfare spending and poverty reduction substantially weakened.

…the real per capita cost in the United States of federal public aid rose…

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Mass Destruction Of Capital

Posted on by jccarlton

Trump has been taken to task for his trade policies. A look at the Wall St Journal on any given day will have articles, editorials and op-ed piece about why Trump is an idiot and that we need freer trade and not more tariffs. But the various journalist are making a mistake. They are not taking into account the massive destruction of American capitol that has gone on since the late 1980’s and the fact that the chickens have finally come home to roost.

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