Mark Steyn: Obama Looks Moderate, Acts Radical

Of course this is Mark Steyn, so you'll read the whole thing, but this quote near the end is worth being reminded of:

The problem in the Western world is that governments are spending money faster than their citizenry or economies can generate it. As Gerald Ford liked to say, "A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have." And that's true. But there's an intermediate stage: A government big enough to give Phil from Cathedral City everything he wants isn't big enough to get Phil to give any of it back. That's the stage the Europeans are at: Their electorates are hooked on unsustainable levels of "services," but no longer can conceive of life without them.

I don't want to live in Europe in North America. Do you?

Mark Steyn Takes on Bailouts.....

... in his unerringly to the point but humorous style.

"General Motors now has a market valuation about a third of Bed, Bath & Beyond, and no one says your Swash 700 Elongated Biscuit Toilet Seat Bidet is too big to fail. GM has a market capitalization of about $2.4 billion. For purposes of comparison, Toyota's
market cap is $100 billion and change (the change being bigger than the whole of GM). General Motors, like the other two geezers of the Old Three, is a vast retirement home with a small money-losing auto subsidiary. The UAW is AARP in an Edsel: It has three times as many retirees and widows as "workers" (I use the term loosely). GM has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to a million people."

President Bush seems to think that it would be a mistake to let the Big 3 file for Chapter 11. His decision to go ahead and bail them out anyway, despite it failing in the Congress, will probably prove to be a bigger one and will not actually bail them out at all. Go read it all of course.

Mark Steyn Is Back

Mark Steyn had been on hiatus for a while but now appears to be back with his regular weekly column in the Orange County Register. This one is about the election, of course.

"While few electorates consciously choose to leap left, a couple more steps every election, and eventually societies reach a tipping point. In much of the West, it's government health care. It changes the relationship between state and citizen into something closer to pusher and junkie."

Need I say it? Read the whole thing.

Mark Steyn on Joe the Plumber

Mark Steyn has a column up at National Review Online entitled "Joe the Plumber vs. Joe the Hair-Plugger", which is both very serious and very funny (but you expect that with Steyn, don't you?) at the same time.

"Supposedly, under the Obama tax plan, 95 per cent of the American people will get a tax cut. You’d think that at this point the natural skepticism of any sentient being other than six-week-old puppies might kick in, but apparently not. If you’re wondering why Obama didn’t simply announce that under his plan 112 per cent of the American people will get a tax cut, well, they ran it past the focus groups who said that that was all very generous but they’d really like it if he could find a way to stick it to Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove and whatnot. So 95 per cent it is..........

.........Anyway, our Fact Check Unit ran the numbers on the Obama tax-cut plan and the number is correct: “95.” It’s the words “per cent” immediately following that are wrong: that’s a typing error accidentally left in from the first draft. It should read: Under the Obama plan, 95 of the American people will get a tax cut."

0bama's mathematically impossible tax plan should worry everyone. When 45% of the populace pay no taxes, it is not possible to give 95% a tax cut. So how does 0bama propose to pull this off? Refundable tax credits is the Doublespeak du jour mechanism he is proposing. This is just another word for welfare. You can't "refund" anything to someone who never paid anything in the first place. If they're getting a check from the Treasury, that money had to be confiscated from someone else. That someone else is probably a business owner who now won't have that money available to invest in growing his business and giving someone else the opportunity to earn some of that money. When 70% of the existing jobs in this country are provided by small businesses and 80% of the new ones, taking this money out of the productive economy and redistributing it to people who had no hand in producing it is not only insane but fundamentally wrong. Increasing tax rates will also act to decrease GDP which will decrease tax revenues. The next time you hear some smug nit-wit going on about how it's stupid to reduce tax rates when you are running a deficit, point them to that (and pray their math and reading comprehension skills are on a par with a 9th grader's).

Obama the Self-Absorbed Adolescent

Mark Steyn's column in this week's Orange County Register really rips the Democrats and Obama in particular for objecting to Presidnet Bush's speech to the Knesset on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of Israel. One particular passage appears to have particularly irked them. Even though the speech makes no reference to any living Democrat Obama has decided it's all about him. Isn't that just like an adolescent to think that everythng is all about him? As usual, Steyn nails it:

"Honestly. What a bunch of self-absorbed ninnies. Here's what the president said:

"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

It says something for Democrat touchiness that the minute a guy makes a generalized observation about folks who appease terrorists and dictators the Dems assume: Hey, they're talking about me. Actually, he wasn't – or, to be more precise, he wasn't talking only about you

In fact the senator who uttered those words in 1939 was William Borah of Idaho, a Republican. The Democrats should really take to heart the old adage; "It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt." Plus, it's harder to get your foot in there when your piehole is shut.

Read the whole thing, of course.