This is my homebrew version of Hank’s Hefeweisen. Like the Red Irish Ale it is an easy beer to drink. Unlike previous Hefeweisens I have drunk it has a darker color. It also had a more robust head than the Red Irish Ale. Since we are without power tonight I am left to comment on the finer points of beer.
After listening to a multitude of pundits and a cursory reading of the opinion I am left with the opinion that Judge Roberts fell on his sword in an attempt to preserve the stature of the court. However honorable this effort make look to some I am convinced that his actions reflect his overriding concern about the public’s opinion of the court rather than the responsibility the judiciary has to the law. In a perfect world we would have a sense of closure after this decision. In a less perfect world we would have at least a sense that there some common ground that our politicians could work with to cobble a consensus. Instead we are left with a new gapping tax hole that unravels the checks and balances our forefathers carefully crafted into the Constitution. So what should our legislators work on next, reforming the health care reform or close the new gaping tax hole? In one fell swoop he chose to change a law into a tax so that he could avoid overturning a law that was duly passed by the legislature. It is a poisoned cup of wine in we drink in which everyone loses.
The Roma tomatoes looked great in the grocery story, the Greek olives were inexpensive, and I had a little bit of old French bread and Parmigiano-Reggiano. The beer was optional but it does make cooking more fun.
One of the ideas I have been toying with is that socialism cannot survive without the creation of “new” wealth. To be differentiated from other wealth distributions such as “to the victors belong the spoils”, socialism has a moral purpose. At its core socialism is a method of distributing the wealth fairly. The problems is how to get yours hands on the wealth and how to distribute the wealth fairly. During the Industrial Revolution the economic gains flowed to everyone but in particular to a disproportionately small group of people. The moral argument for socialism is that the wealth should be distributed across a broader section of the population. Socialism wants wealth distribution to be fair.
For the last 200 years the Western world has been very successful at creating new products that directly resulted in greater economic efficiencies and more “new” wealth. In this positive atmosphere the wealth creators have been receptive to distributing some of wealth created even though they questioned the fairness of the allocation. Ultimately they agreed and their philosophy was best epitomized by JFK when he said, “A rising tide lifts all boats”. This continual growth in “new” wealth has allowed socialism to thrive and grow to a proportionately larger size of the economy. Recently I was surprised to see that the real return for the last decade was ”“3.4%. When you combine this with slow or no economic growth predictions for the next few years, can socialism survive without “new” wealth creation? Redistributing existing wealth is a completely different problem than redistributing “new” wealth. If the socialism based on redistributing “new” wealth is asleep or possibly dead, what will the new socialism look like? Jay Cost wrote an excellent article, The Politics of Loss in National Affairs that goes much farther on the politics of wealth redistribution.
When political scientist Harold Lasswell, writing in the mid-1930s, defined politics as the decisions society makes about "who gets what, when, and how," he might as well have been describing the debate over taxes and spending in the United States today. Butwhat happens when the focus of the political debate changes from who gets what to who loses what? This concept is unfamiliar to Americans, who have enjoyed more than 100 years of (mostly) uninterrupted economic growth.
The problem with debt and taxes is that they are maximized when the people are thinking about something else. The real estate and financial bubbles were the recent distractions that allowed the debt and taxes to continue their inexorable climb. Now that we have run out of other people’s money to spend, our news media is compelled to cover the story until the financial conditions change. Although the people cannot get away from discussions on the perils of debt and taxes, they have figured out “solutions” to shield themselves from these problems. Their “solutions” opens the can of unintended consequences. The unsustainable political trade-offs of the past will be discarded in an effort to match up government spending with revenue. The rigors of balanced budgeting already imposed on personal, city, and state finances will gradually be imposed at the federal level. Political parties who spent the last 70 years supporting and encouraging unsustainable spending habits for political gains will spend the next ten years trying to restore public confidence at the same time they are trying to put the worms back into the can.
“What we’re seeing is the real end game,” says Mauldin. “We’re coming to the end of government’s ability to borrow money to fund current spending that’s beyond the growth of their economy.
…
That’s where Western governments are. They’ve run out of the ability to borrow money to finance their current consumption. This is a good thing that it’s coming to an end. I don’t see this as negative in the longer-term. It’s still going to be a bumpy ride for the markets. It’s certainly going to be (an interesting) ride for the business as usual crowd.”Read more at KingWorldNews.com.
MAULDIN: WE’RE APPROACHING THE END OF THE END GAME
Sam Ro
Tue, 19 Jun 2012 08:53:00 GMT
In my last post of energy conservation, June Follow up on Green Technology that pays for itself, I was surprised to find that my energy savings were being overwhelmed by electrical rate increases. This bothered me on several different levels. Naturally I was disappointed I was spending more for the same amount of electricity while my wages stagnate. The more curious problem was why did my rate go up when the price of natural gas and coal go down?
Yesterday I went through my electrical bills and added up my delivery and generation costs for the first five months of the year. I divided these two numbers by the total electricity used to come up with an average delivery and generation rate. I did the same for the first five months of last year, too. My delivery rate went up 18.3% while my generation rate went down ”“17.7%. The lower generation rate makes since it was highly influenced by the higher winter rate in January and February of 2011. The higher delivery rate does not make sense. This increase is much higher than inflation. What did Duke spend the money on?
I opened the door and found a fawn lying just a couple feet from the door. I took a couple of pictures. The fawn left when more people came out the door.
Here is a great article I found on ETF Daily News that talks a lot about credit card debt. The article was originally published b the author here. I would like to believe that the consumer is getting financially smarter but he makes a pretty persuasive case that debt write offs is a much larger force in driving the drop in credit card balances than individuals paying down their debt. I guess the saying you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink applies to American consumer attitude toward paying down credit card debt.
I am fascinated with America’s love affair with credit card debt and Rick has collected a lot more data on credit card usage than me. Some of the credit card data comes from private sources. I do not have a problem with the private sources but I think we could elevate credit card to a higher visibility level if the Federal Reserve defined what actually constitutes the average credit card balance. The problem is calculating the number of credit card holders. For this reason I found my attempts to calculate the average credit card debt level using the Federal Reserve data did not confirm what the private sector was reporting.
I could not help but get a chuckle when I read the Mission Accomplished article in the Wall Street Journal. In that article he says,
Obama might have done better to follow the advice of the Washington Post’s Ed Rogers: "If you are president of the United States and you don’t have anything to say, don’t have a press conference to say it. If you’re the president of the United States and by Thursday it’s widely believed you’ve had one of the worst weeks of your presidency, take Friday off, and specifically avoid having a press conference."
To top it off he says something that will be repeated an enormous number of times before the November election, “The private sector is fine”. As a person working in the private sector I can say that the private sector is not fine. We are nervous. So far in 2012 our sales are slightly better than last year but our margins have declined. These trends seem to be the dominant themes in the private sector and explain why the private sector has not hired more people.
Unfortunately the President goes on to explain how the economy would be much better if we hired more public sector employees. He wants us to believe that this stimulus plan is not much different than the stimulus plan from three years ago, it will be more effective. A sign of insanity is when you keep repeating the same things and expect different results.
This misses the most important point we can get from the Wisconsin gubernatorial election, restricting collective bargaining allowed the state to “right size” public sector and keep more public sector employees employed. It was not pretty but “right sizing” appears to have balanced the state budget, maintained government employment, and improved the long term availability of these benefits. The Wisconsin vote confirmed that old adage, the best government is the one which works.
Yesterday we had a party and I served baby back ribs. I smoked the ribs for three hours and finished them in foil to get that fall off the bone tenderness. Although my homebrew Irish Red Ale is not in the picture, the beer was popular and a good match for the meat. The good news is that I still have a case of beer left.