Visclosky voted for climate change

I didn't really see any news on how Visclosky voted on the climate change bill, which passed the house with every Democrat vote except 44, of which one was Visclosky. There were only 8 Republican votes for it.

Here's an interactive map showing the votes by Congressional District. Obviously, the Midwest was against this thing.

Well, it passed.

State budget passed. Doesn't look like there are any tax increases in there, that's good. They are going to allow a referendum to see if Lake, Porter, etc. counties want a 1/4% income tax to go to mass transit. I predict that that will go down to massive, massive defeat.

Too bad it passed, I was looking forward to state government shutting down.

Shut the F***er down

Democrats threaten to shut the State of Indiana down instead of pass a budget that they don't agree with.

I say bring it on.

As we saw with the Sanford incident, people really think that life on earth required the government to run every aspect of their lives. The truth is very different.

Things will run smoothly without state government. People will go to Illinois to gamble. Or better yet, save their money. What else do you need the government to do for you?

This will be an educational experience.

Democrats hate America, 6/30/2009 edition

Democrats are much more likely to drive foreign cars. So much for their support of unions.

Blue-staters on each coast, from Los Angeles to Seattle and from Boston to the District, are the most likely to drive foreign cars. Domestic brands have their highest levels of market share in the mostly conservative interior of the country.

In some blue states - where a Democrat has won at least three of the last four presidential contests - foreign cars have as much as 60 percent of the market, as measured by vehicle registrations. It is mostly in red states - Republican strongholds - where domestic cars have 74 percent of the market or more.

This pattern holds in 36 states and the District.

The three politically purple states - those that have evenly split the last four elections - strongly prefer domestic cars.

Be careful with that party label, though - and check out the union label.

Its true that liberal Democrats are the least likely group to consider an American car, according to a recent Gallup poll. And conservative Republicans clearly prefer domestic cars. But one species turns the car-buying political spectrum inside out: conservative Democrats. The commitment of this group to buy American cars is so strong that conservative Republicans look downright bicoastal by comparison.

You can argue that GM, Ford, and Chrysler have nothing to do with America. I disagree. America is mom, apple pie, and a Chevy Impala. America is a full size, quad cab pickup truck, or a Chevy Tahoe towing a man toy.

Says the guy who drives a Saab. Hey, I'm a sucker for a turbo. At least it WAS owned by GM.

The economic costs of encouraging home ownership

I've talked before about how the US is overinvested in housing, and how government policies like the GSAs and the mortgage interest deduction are responsible. Buzzcut the Dictator would get rid of both.

Here is a Fed study on the subject.

Over time, we would be a much richer country if we didn't subsidize home ownership.

Is it the sanctimony, not the hypocrisy?

Commenter "Doug" says that Sanford's sin was sanctimony, not hypocrisy.

I guess he means that Sanford lead the charge to get Clinton impeached. Payback is a bitch.

Of course, we ALL know that the real reason Clinton was impeached was that he lied under oath in a sexual harassment deposition by Paula Jones. Clinton has a history of abusing women whom he has power over. He's a grade A scumbag. Lewinsky was just a little more... receptive... than the other women he abused, but what he did with her was still abusive.

Back to Sanford. The real issue, in my mind, is that certain people are Schadenfreude-ing him because of his previous positions on family values.

Should anyone doubt that Sanford was right that cheating, no fault divorce, and out of wedlock childbirths are destroying America, here's an introduction.

BTW, my parents just got divorced after 35 years of marriage. So the issue is a little raw with me. I'm just thankful that they lasted as long as they did. Even so, dealing with them now as singles is... upsetting. I can imagine how the Sanford kids feel.

Sanford is a hypocrite. Get over it.

Listening to some, it would seem that the worst thing about Sanford's affair is that he's a "family values conservative". Thus, because he strayed, he's a hypocrite.

In modern America, the only thing worse than being judgemental is being a hypocrite.

If Sanford were a libertine liberal like Bill Clinton, this affair would be a non-issue.

The problem with that is, family values are the biggest issue of our time.

The vast majority of our social problems are the results of bad behavior in violation of family values. Divorce and out of wedlock births lead to poverty. Show me someone who is poor, and I'll show you someone who is likely to be divorced (or never married) and have children out of wedlock.

Sanford has shown an incredible amount of bad judgement and disappointed us all, but we should not be surprised. We're all sinners. That doesn't mean that we should all just accept sin, or worse, encourage it.

Sadly, we as a country are not prepared to talk about the societal chaos that libertine ism is causing. Divorce is a non-issue. Out of wedlock births are skyrocketing, and no one cares, as long as you're not a hypocrite about it.

How would you ration health care

In a comment on another blog, talking about my favorite subject, something brilliant was said:

A hypothesis:

If you ask: should medical services be rationed by the a government board, or be left to consumer choice? More people will pick the latter.

But if you ask: should medical services be rationed by medical need as judged by a government board, or by the market? More people will pick the former.

These two are for practical purposes identical, of course. It's all in the phrasing.

Rationing is coming. We simply cannot afford the healthcare system that we have now, especially Medicare and Medicaid. How should health care be rationed?

My preferred plan (taxing employer paid health insurance premiums and Medicare as income, promoting high deductible catastrophic health insurance) uses the free market to ration care. Individuals spending their own money largely determine what they are willing to pay for themselves. Only on the high end, for very sick people with very severe illnesses, would we have to rely on "experts" to determine care.

In almost every other case, Obamacare will need to become an HMO on sterioids in order to ration care. I don't think that that will fly in America, and instead health care will continue on the road to bankruptcy.

Lake County Assessments Drop 15%

Read this article and tell me exactly what they did to get a 15% assessment drop.

It seems to me that assessments should be (are?) a separate issue from the homestead exemption. Why would increasing the HE result in decreased assessments?

You've got your assessment, from which you subtract your exemptions, to which you multiply your tax rate, which results in your property tax owed. Right? Isn't this article mixing these things up?

Would you prefer a 4 day a week, 10 hour per day job?

Interesting letter to the editor in the Times. The building trades that work at BP's Whiting Refinery agreed to go to a 4 day, 10 hours per day workweek.

BP did this because they were not getting enough work done in 8 hours. There's a lot of staging of work that occurs no matter how long or short the day is, as well as breaks, lunch, etc. The trades are more productive in 10 hours than in 8, even if they lose the work on the 5th day.

Some trades like the change, some don't. I've seen ironworkers protesting on Indianapolis Blvd. in front of the plant.

Myself, I would have mixed feelings about it. No doubt, having three day weekends all the time would be awesome. I almost forget I have a job on the Monday evening of a three day weekend. It is very relaxing.

But I'm not an early riser, and you almost have to get in at 6AM on 4-10's. Otherwise you're getting out of work way too late for things like little league games and other kid related stuff.

Finally, being sallaried, I often already put in 10s. It might not be that many more hours of work, in return for an extra day off. That's pretty cool.

I don't know how I'd feel if this applied to me. I sympathize with the trades, but on the other hand wonder if a lot of the guys like it.

Obama hammered on jobs from the left

Interesting take here.

One recent example comes from a new report issued my old colleagues at the liberal-leaning New America Foundation called "Not Out of the Woods: A Report on the Jobless Recovery Underway." It amounts to a blistering, if largely unintentional, critique of the administration's policies, providing a sobering antidote to manufactured euphoria peddled by both presidential spin-meisters and some Wall Streeters.

The report baldly assets that the president's programs are simply not sufficient to make up for a "huge job creation deficit" that is getting worse by the day. It estimates the country needs to generate 125,000 or more new jobs a month just to keep pace with population growth--something few see happening for at least several years.

Even with little immediate hope for such employment gains, the report does cite government and private-sector projections of upward of 10% unemployment well into next year. More worrisome still, the authors assert that the administration's current program is unlikely to create a return to a "normal" level of joblessness--to between 4% and 5%--until after the president's first term.

...

Hindery is no conservative. He was an adviser to John Edwards and, more recently, to the president himself. Yet his prognosis is grimmer than the ones offered by most right-wingers. He calculates that the real unemployment rate in the country last month was not 9.3%, which is the figure that was reported, but rather closer to an alarming 16.8%. By that measure, more than 30 million people are effectively out of work. That's nearly one-fifth of the labor force.

What Obama did to GM and especially Chrysler, while essentially allowing the financial companies to get away scott free (well, except for Lehman) is a big part of this. Indiana has unemployment well above 10%, largely because Chrysler and its suppliers are shedding so many jobs.

The only way to grow out of this recession is to improve the returns to work and investment. Get rid of the top two or three income tax rates, get rid of the corporate tax, etc. etc. Forget the stimulus, it isn't working, it can't work.

We came roaring out of the '83 recession because of all the tax cuts. We can do it again.