Megan McArdle is Back

Same Megan, new venue. She's been on leave-of-absence for the last few months (writing a book?). I've been reading her since she was blogging from a trailer in the bottom of Ground Zero and she's always worth the time to read. Here's her take on the upcoming Supreme Court decision on Obamacare.

Economic Illiteracy at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Barack Obama on the Romney campaign pointing out that there is a difference betweeen "outsourcing" and "offshoring": “Yesterday, his advisers tried to clear this up by telling us that there was a difference between ‘outsourcing’ and ‘offshoring.’ Seriously. You can’t make that up.”

Actually, you wouldn't need to "make this up," because there is a difference. This is not by any means the sole example of Barack Obama's economic illiteracy but he manages to make himself sound even smaller and more petty than usual. Kevin Williamson at National Review explains: 

“Outsourcing” happens when a firm contracts out its non-core functions to other vendors, e.g., a hotel decides to hire a cleaning service rather than keep maids on the hotel payroll. To take an extreme but illustrative case, consider that the firms that provide car-driving services do not manufacture their own automobiles or stitch their drivers’ uniforms, even though doing so would “create jobs.” They outsource those tasks to GM or Ford and to whomever makes their uniforms. Likewise, their communication systems are outsourced to Apple or Motorola or RIM.

But at least they should “buy American,” right? GM is an “American” company building “American” cars, but it too outsources many of its needs, sometimes to other U.S.-based companies, sometimes to companies overseas. Moving facilities overseas is what “offshoring” means; it is not synonymous with “outsourcing.” GM has decided that it can build cars without manufacturing brake pads or tires, much less manufacturing steel or rubber, and its production partners include facilities, workers, and investors from around the world. (This is, it should go without saying, a good thing. People who talk mistily about the virtues of “global cooperation” rarely recognize it when they see it.)

The belief that seems to be popular on the left is that the point of offshoring is to take advantage of cheap labor but in Williamson's article he points out that the offshored functions tend to go to high wage countries like Germany and Japan, not Haiti and Rwanda. Williamson:  "That is because low wages are not the goal of offshoring. High productivity is the goal of offshoring. There is a reason that BMW does not move all of its manufacturing operations to India, and patriotism is not it."

Read the whole thing. 

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Daniel Henninger: A middle class is the result of growth, not its cause.

That is an important point made by Daniel Henninger in yesterday's Wonderland column in the Wall Street Journal in which he asserts that the coming election boils down to one issue: economic growth. Voters need to choose between two economic growth models, Barack Obama's class based growth model or one that actually works; a low-tax, regulatory certainty and no more than absolutely necessary. In other words, as close to a free market as possible.

Go read the whole thing.

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Fast & Furious: Botched Investigation, Or Something More Sinister?

If you don't know what Operation Fast & Furious or have only recently heard about it, it is probably because you rely on the mainstream media for your news and they have been very studiously ignoring it for over a year. Why would they do that? It isn't because it isn't news. It's because it's news that reflects very badly on their man, Barack Obama and his Attorney General, Eric Holder.

Bill Whittle's latest Afterburner will bring you up to speed on what it's all about:

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An Open Letter to "Mr." Obama

The incomparable Vodkapundit has written a letter to our Dear Leader, offering some good advice about what he should do if SCOTUS strikes down the healthcare law:

Mr. Obama, if the Supreme Court does strike down this law, you should get down on both knees and thank them.

And then you ought to stay there a while and beg us all for forgiveness.
 

We’re waiting.

Do go and read the whole thing.

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The US Budget Explained

I ran into this over at Samizdata while on my Daily Blog Patrol this morning. I believe it is quite self-explanatory so I will make no further comment.

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Afterburner with Bill Whittle - Into the Sea

"This Is Not How a Free Society Treats People"

There's a great guest post over at Zero Hedge by Simon Black . He is commenting on the proposal by Chuckie (don't get between me and that camera if you know what's good for you) Schumer to impose a punitive exit tax on Americans, natural born or naturalized, who renounce their citizenship. he was prompted to do this after hearing the news that Brazilian-born, naturalized US citizen and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin had opted to renounce his US citizenship and that doing so might save him $65 million in capital gains taxes when Facebook completes its IPO. From the post:

But no. Saverin left behind a lot of value and decided to move on to greener pastures in Singapore. Now the do-gooders in Congress are cooking up new legislation (the EX-PATRIOT Act) designed to permanently bar ‘renunciants’ like Saverin from re-entering the United States.

It’s interesting that, rather than change their ways of doing business and introducing legislation that provides incentives for productive people to come here and stay here, they maintain policies that chase people away, and introduce new ones to lock the door after they’re gone.

The lesson here (especially for natural-born citizens) is this: simply by accident of birth, you are born with a lifelong obligation that you never signed up for to finance the corrupt misdealings of the political class. And if you choose to abandon this obligation, they will bar you from ever entering your homeland again.

Regardless of what the propaganda says, this is not how a free society treats people. It might look and feel like a representative democracy on the surface, but under the hood it’s the modern day equivalent of feudal serfdom.

Last year 1,800 American citizens opted to do the same thing as Eduardo Saverin. They did the analysis and decided that the burdens imposed by their citizenship outweighed the benefits. IRS overreach in requiring foreign banks to report on accounts held by US citizens are just making it hard for Americans to open bank accounts where they may be living overseas and the US is the only country on the planet that taxes its citizens on their income earned outside the country. 

Eduardo Saverin made a completely rational decision and he should not be vilified or punished for it.

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Firewall with Bill Whittle - How Did America Become a "Beta Nation?"

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Should You Need a Government License to Make an Honest Living?

It seems like in too many cases the answer has become yes. As the following Institute for Justice video will make clear there are far too many occupations that impose licensing requirements that really have nothing to do with public health and safety and everything to do with protecting the turf of incumbents. The video relates how in 1950 only 1 in 20 workers needed a license for any particular occupation. Now it's 1 in 3. The Institute looked at 102 low to mid-level occupations to see what barriers were thrown in front of people who might desire to make a living in those occupations.

In my state, Arizona, for example, to be able to cut and style hair it is necessary to get a license that requires 1,500 hours of instruction. Not usually one to look to federal government requirements as an example, the Federal Aviation Administration actually seems to have the right balance. To qualify for an Airline Transport Pilot's license, an ATP, the requirement is for a total minimum flight time of 1,500 hours. However, unlike the requirement of 1,500 hours to wield a pair of scissors and possibly do a bad haircut, the actual minimum legal requirement for instruction is roughly 55 to 75 hours spent with an instructor, depending on how you interpret Part 61 of the Federal Aviation Regulations (FAR). The rest is minimum logged time in various buckets; total flight time, cross country, night, instrument, etc. Most of the time is individual practice. You move on to various license levels by FAA check rides your instructor signs you off for when you are ready.

To require so much instruction time to cut hair and so little to gain a license to fly an airlplane that is potentially carrying  hundreds of people is ridiculous on its face. 

Now, with that in mind, here is the video.

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The Train Set - Bill Whittle's Afterburner

An interersting piece on the "love of theory" and what evils it can lead to:



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Video: "If I wanted America to Fail"

Yup. This is how I'd do it too.




(Via Instapundit)
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Is Your State Tax Withholding Actually Going to the State?

Maybe not.

Across the United States more than 2,700 companies are collecting state income taxes from hundreds of thousands of workers – and are keeping the money with the states’ approval, says an eye-opening report published on Thursday.

The report from Good Jobs First, a nonprofit taxpayer watchdog organization funded by Ford, Surdna and other major foundations, identifies 16 states that let companies divert some or all of the state income taxes deducted from workers’ paychecks. None of the states requires notifying the workers, whose withholdings are treated as taxes they paid.

This bribing companies to stay in or relocate to a particular state is galling enough but to use what employees believe are taxes they pay to the state to fund these bribes is immoral. No wonder state governments are always crying poverty and asking us to pay even more.

Read the whole thing.

The Diplomad Has Returned

The Diplomad is, was, a dormant blog that I used to read about 6-7 years ago. Well, it’s back. The author is a now-retired US Foreign Service officer whose last post was Indonesia and who was there at the time of the 2004 earthquake/tsunami off the coast of Sumatra. He is a very incisive writer with not a lot good to say about our current foreign policy, liberal elites, NGOs the UN, etc. I’ll be adding him to my blogroll under the Daily Blog Patrol section. Just for an example of his take-no-prisoners style, read this post from Friday. A sample:

^{I had the misfortune recently of visiting a major university campus. I parked in the faculty lot. My Corvette was the lone representative of American vehicular manufacturing in that lot. I was awash in a tide of cars made in Germany, Japan, and Korea, or by their factories in the US, Mexico, and Canada. That Corvette with its NRA sticker stood out as it was surrounded Alamo-style by these foreign invaders and their Obama and their Co-Exist stickers. Don't get me wrong. I am all for consumers having options, and Americans should have the option to buy foreign cars. I was struck, however, talking to faculty and students by their defense of the Obama bail-out of the car industry and their ostensible support for unionized labor. They could not see the clash between how they spend their own money and how they force taxpayers to spend ours. For whatever reasons, these "highly educated" faculty and students buy cars made overseas or by non-union labor in the US, but insist that the taxpayers subsidize the UAW, which to a large extend caused the near collapse of GM and Chrysler.}

You should read the whole thing, of course.

 

Slowly, Slowly – Bill Whittle

Everyone is familiar with the boiling frog metaphor. A frog tossed into a pot of boiling water will jump out but if you put it in a pot of cold water and turn  on the heat it will die before it realizes it is in trouble. In the video below, Bill Whittle explains how our freedom is gradually disappearing, slowly, slowly in the same way.

 

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