21st Century Socialism is So Much Better

Venezuela's Inflation Rate Is 200% and Credit Card Companies Are Cashing In - Excerpt

"Venezuela’s economic collapse is driving factories out of business, leaving store shelves barren and wiping out workers’ purchasing power.  MasterCard Inc. is doing just fine. Two powerful forces are pushing Venezuelans to rely increasingly on credit cards amid the chaos: runaway inflation and soaring crime." - Yahoo Finance  

Full Story

Venezuela Inflation Seen Pushing 200% as Rationing Deepens  - Excerpt

Venezuela, which already has the world’s fastest inflation rate at a reported 69 percent in December, could see that rate more than double this year as it struggles to respond to falling oil prices.
“We may end up this year with inflation at close to 200 percent,” Alberto Ades, co-head of global economics research at Bank of America, said in an interview on Bloomberg Surveillance Friday. He forecast the economy would shrink 4 percent. “Venezuela is in a dire crisis.” - Bloomberg Business

Full Story

Amazingly, Maduro Is Going To Make The Venezuelan Economy Even Worse. Yes, Worse  - Excerpt

There’s a useful point often made that when you’re at the bottom of a hole the sensible thing is to stop digging. That politics doesn’t work this way we know, almost every politician preferring to double down on their own prejudices rather than take note of reality and what the universe is trying to tell her. But it is rare to see true howling lunacy in action in politics, despite the sort of people who become politicians. Perhaps because we in the rich countries never do allow the true drooling incompetents to take power: or perhaps more realistically we never allow anyone to have enough power to destroy our economy.

I do not say that Maduro drools, nor howls, nor even that he’s a lunatic, but he is doubling down on a remarkably incompetent piece of public policy. . .

- Forbes

Full Story

Obamacare Exchanges collapse in seven states costing taxpayers millions more

This just in.  “Despite over $205 million in federal taxpayer funding, Hawaii’s Obamacare exchange website will soon shut down.  Since its implementation, the exchange has somehow failed to become financially viable because of lower than expected Obamacare enrollment figures. . . . Unfortunately, taxpayers will have to hand out an additional 30 million so that  Hawaii can migrate to the federal system.”  American’s for Tax Reform  I am shocked.  Shocked!

Hawaii is not the only state-wide Obamacare exchange to fail. The Oregon, Massachusetts, Maryland, Vermont, New Mexico, and Nevada Obamacare exchanges have already collapsed costing tax payers millions and millions more. Any way that you slice it the collapse of so many state exchanges is yet another major failure of the Obama Care law. I am shocked.  Shocked!  

But how could this be happening? The Affordable Health Care Act (aka Obamacare) was supposed to bend the cost curve and usher in a new era of, well affordable health care.  Obamacare should be working, we are told, because it puts the Federal Government squarely in control of a massive percentage of the health care system thus creating a giant, centrally planned, bureaucratically operated, politically motivated system that takes hard earned money from tax payers and gives it to politicians and their special interest cronies (e.g. insurance companies).  

 How could it fail?  I’m just shocked. Shocked! Really I am (not).

 – Mark Van Schuyver

Privitize Amtrak!

"Amtrak has consumed almost $40 billion in federal subsidies since 1971, but has never earned a profit, and most of its routes lose money running empty trains. In addition, federal reports reveal that Amtrak regularly loses tens of millions of dollars on food sales and improper payments." - Washington Times

Amtrak wastes millions of dollars in taxpayer dollars annually and judging by the number of people killed and injured this week I am guessing that it has safety issues.  Why should this be a surprise?  Amtrak is a government controlled entity. It has no competition. It operates in a politicized, subsidized, government bubble. Amtrak is ObamaCare on rails. No matter how much waste, corruption, and death Amtrak delivers no taxpayer will be left behind when it comes to pouring good money after bad into this poster child of government bureaucratic waste.

I say, privatize Amtrak. Eliminate all the government subsidies, handouts, oversight, price controls, intervention, and barriers to competition. Allow Amtrak to succeed or fail based on the value it can create for society rather than on the profit it currently creates for politicians and special interests. Take Amtrak away from self-serving bureaucrats and let it compete with other forms of transportation on a level playing field.  Private sector competition will force Amtrak to lead the way to safer, more efficient, and innovative transportation in the service of society or or else get out of the way for someone who will.

Mark Van Schuyver

Climate change propaganda is simply a ruse for a socialist agenda

Walter Williams on Global Warming. An excerpt . . .

"Climate change propaganda is simply a ruse for a socialist agenda. Consider the statements of some environmentalist leaders. Christiana Figueres, the U.N.'s chief climate change official, said that her unelected bureaucrats are undertaking "probably the most difficult task" they have ever given themselves, "which is to intentionally transform the (global) economic development model." 

In 2010, German economist and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change official Ottmar Edenhofer said, "One must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy." The article in which that interview appeared summarized Edenhofer's views this way: "Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection. ... The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world's resources will be negotiated."

The most disgusting aspect of the climate change debate is the statements by many that it's settled science. There is nothing more anti-scientific than the idea that any science is settled. Very often we find that the half-life of many scientific ideas is about 50 years. For academics to not criticize their colleagues and politicians for suggesting that scientific ideas are not subject to challenge is the height of academic dishonesty. . ." - Walter Williams

No surprise, Kansas benefits from tax cuts

Unemployment has dropped to 4.2% from 5.5% in 2013, and wages and job growth are steadily climbing. Wall Street Journal

Excerpt, 

• In March 2013, unemployment in Kansas stood at 5.5%. It has since dropped to 4.2%, tied for 14th lowest in the country.

• From 1998-2012, Kansas ranked 38th in private-sector job growth, according Bureau of Labor Statistics data crunched by the Kansas Policy Institute. In 2013—the first year after the tax reform—the state climbed to 27th place, and in 2014 it moved to 21st, placing it in the top half of states.

• In the second half of 2014, hourly wages in Kansas grew 3.5%, according to BLS data, far faster than the national average of 1.9%. . .

“I just think Kansas City is a great study,” the governor says. “This is an unusual place, where you’ve got a city virtually equally divided between two states.” The results? Over the past two calendar years, private-sector jobs increased by 5.6% on the Kansas side and only 2.2% on the Missouri. In the same period hourly wages grew $1.22 on the Kansas side, compared with $0.61 on the Missouri side.

Wall Street Journal

Restore the Fourth

Reason.com

"What's wrong with bulk collection? The warrant issued by the FISA court that authorizes bulk collection is known as a general warrant. A general warrant does not name a person or place, but authorizes the bearer to search wherever he wishes and seize whatever he finds. General warrants were a tool of colonial repression used by the king prior to the American Revolution. They were issued by secret courts in London. They were so loathed by the Framers that they are expressly forbidden by the Fourth Amendment. . . "  Full article

Daylight "Central Planning" Time Bandits!

“How was your weekend?” a colleague of mine asked me today. 

“Fine. Yours?”  I replied.

“It was wonderful,” she said. “I so enjoyed having that extra hour Sunday evening.”

“What extra hour was that?”  I asked. 

“You know.  Daylight Savings Time,” she said.

“No one got an extra hour yesterday.” I said.

“What?” She responded.  “Daylight Savings Time. An extra hour in the evening.”

“Did the sun shine for an hour longer on Sunday that it did on Saturday?”  I asked.

“Well, no . . .”

“Then what are you talking about?  There is no extra hour!”

“You are saying the extra hour isn’t real. . .” She said.

“Of course it isn’t real.” I said.  She looked sad.

“You want it to be real, that extra free hour of time in your day, don’t you?” I asked.

“Yes.” She smiled. “I do.  And, whatever. . .  It feels real to me!” 

Ahhhhhh!!!!

This whole conversation made my brain cramp.  What would happen, I asked myself, if the government suddenly ordered every private company, public agency, every church, almost everybody in the USA to go to work one hour earlier?  Put this way, surely there would be riots in the street.  People would scream. Somebody would occupy something!  Experts would appear on cable TV shouting, “How dare this intrusive, out-of-control ginormous, central planning, Soviet style government infringe on our freedom!”  Surely people would rebel if such an order were given.  I can hear it now, a deep, sinister, Big Brotherly voice, “All citizens will report for work one hour early beginning today.” Creepy! Put like this, I believe that there would be massive resistance.

But the central planners in Washington know how to spin things so that Big Brother sounds more like a kindly grandfather.  They do a little legislative sleight of hand and call their central plan to change time “Daylight Savings Time” and tout imagined benefits.  Then, presto, everybody in the entire country goes to work an hour earlier whistling all the way and saying stupid things like, “l love having an extra hour in my day golly gee!”

To make it worse, no one I know has any idea why the central planners in Washington, D.C. change the time.  I did an unofficial poll with colleagues and friends.  Some of the responses,

• “I think it was done for the farmers.  So they would have an extra hour of daylight for farming.”
• “I think it was done for the school children so they could get on the bus earlier.”
• “I think it was done so people could get more recreation time in the evenings after work.”
• “I think it makes manufacturing more efficient.”
• “I think Ben Franklin did it.”  And, so on and on goes the apologetic jibber jabber.

How quick we are to accept and justify central planning!  I suppose that setting everyone’s clock forward or backward reaps a benefit for some people somewhere somehow but what about the companies and the workers who don’t want to start working an hour earlier today at the whim of a central planning Time Tsar? Why don’t they speak up?

For that matter, what about people who don’t want to go to and pay for government monopoly schools. Why don’t they protest against the central planners? What about the government monopoly retirement insurance program known as Social Security. Why don’t more people speak out against the waste and the nearly one-hundred trillion dollars in unfunded Social Security and Medicare liabilities?  Where are the protesters? What about the dollar killing Federal Reserve for heavens sake?  Central planning on steroids that!

Speaking of Soviet style central planning, what about people who want to choose their own health insurance and their own health care providers but are now forced to participate in the new, one-size-fits-all government run “AHC” health insurance/health care monopoly (aka Obama Care)? Not enough time to complain? Come on! Use that extra hour to resist the time bandits!

Mark VanSchuyver