NYTimes Food Reporter Rejoices at Chick-Fil-A VP's Heart Attack, Apologizes

by Warner Todd Huston 

Mark Bittman, a New York Times food critic, admits he used an "inappropriate phrase" in an August 3 blog posting about Chick-Fil-A. In fact, it was down right Bitter, man, because he seemed to be rejoicing that a vice president of the fast food company had died of a heart attack back in July.

Near-Bankrupt California Awards Hollywood $100M In Corporate Welfare

by John Nolte 

Remember folks, trickle-down economics only work in the entertainment business.

Remember folks, tax cuts for the rich are evil, unless it goes to rich people in Hollywood.

Remember folks, big business is greedy and corrupt and evil -- except for the big business of Hollywood.

In product, spoken word, and political endorsement, Hollywood assails itself without naming itself. Tax cuts for me but not for thee, and now taxpayers in the near-bankrupt state of California are on the hook for a cool $100 million that will feather the nest of movie stars, fat studios, and gajillioniare producers everywhere:

Obama Now Scapegoating Jewish Donor Adelson

by Joel B. Pollak

President Barack Obama is now campaigning and fundraising directly off attacks on the wealth of conservative casino magnate and prominent Jewish philanthropist Sheldon Adelson. Adelson’s good works enjoy bipartisan support--so much so that Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz, who supports Obama, recently blasted Democrats’ attempts to accuse Adelson of using “dirty money” to support his super PAC donations.

Government-Sponsored Poverty

By Jeffrey Tucker

08/07/12 Auburn, Alabama – Growing up in the Cold War, we tended to look at Russia as a nightmare slave society that was utterly and completely foreign to anything Americans knew or could possibly know, absent some kind of invasion.
If I were to summarize the American propaganda message of the time it would be this: We are free, they are not, and that’s why we are rich and they are poor. And, man, did they look poor to our eyes. I could never understand it: How the heck does a once-great people put up with a government that is so obviously and apparently driving the whole population down, year after year?
Well, welcome to 2012 America. Have a look at the extremely scary Federal Reserve report, the Survey of Consumer Finance. If you have the stomach for it, read it yourself. The bean counters have put together the most broad and deep look at the finances of the median family. It turns out that the median American family is financially falling off a cliff, despite (or because of!) the trillions spent trying to prevent this from happening.
The short summary:

Preparing to Fail

By Bill Bonner

08/08/12 Paris, France – Gore Vidal, veteran of WWII, died last week. Here’s something he wrote in 2003.

I can recall thinking, when I got out of the Army in 1946, Well, that’s that. We won. And those who come after us will never need do this again. Then came the two mad wars of imperial vanity — Korea and Vietnam. They were bitter for us, not to mention for the so-called enemy. Next we were enrolled in a perpetual war against what seemed to be the enemy-of-the-month club. This war kept major revenues going to military procurement and secret police, while withholding money from us, the taxpayers, with our petty concerns for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

He might have added another petty concern: national solvency.

Munchin' Lunch at Chick-fil-A: Same-Sex Smoochin' Hits Chicken Chain

NewsBusted

Keynesian Catastrophe: Big Money, Big Government & Big Lies

Cato's Dan Mitchell Debates Inflation on CNBC's The Kudlow Report (3/8/11)

GMU's Lawrence H. White on Free Banking and the Gold Standard (11/18/10)

Tucker Carlson, Cato Institute, speaks at ALEC on December 3 in DC Part 4

The Employment Rate In The United States Is Lower Than It Was During The Last Recession

Did you know that a smaller percentage of Americans are working today than when the last recession supposedly ended?  But you won't hear about this on the mainstream news.  Instead, the mainstream media obsesses over the highly politicized and highly manipulated "unemployment rate".  The media is buzzing about how "163,000 new jobs" were added in July but the unemployment rate went up to "8.254%".  Sadly, those numbers are quite misleading.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in June 142,415,000 people had jobs in the United States. In July, that number declined to 142,220,000. That means that 195,000 fewer Americans were working in July than in June. But somehow that works out to "163,000 new jobs" in July.  I am not exactly sure how they get that math to add up.  Perhaps someone out there can explain it to me.  Personally, I find that the "employment rate" gives a much clearer picture of what is actually going on in the economy.  The employment to population ratio is a measure of the percentage of working age Americans that actually have jobs.  When it goes up that is good.  When it goes down, that is bad.  In July, the employment to population ratio dropped from 58.6 percent to 58.4 percent.  Overall, the percentage of working age Americans that have jobs has now been under 59 percent for 35 months in a row.

14 Questions People Ask About How To Prepare For The Collapse Of The Economy

How in the world is someone supposed to actually prepare for an economic collapse?  What should you do with your money?  How can you make sure that your family is going to be okay?  How can you prepare if your resources are extremely limited?  These are the kinds of questions people ask me all the time.  Once people understand that the economy has been collapsing and will continue to collapse, then the next step for most of them is that they want to get prepared for the storm that is coming.  So where should someone get started?  Well, the truth is that no two people are facing the exact same set of circumstances, so preparation is going to look different for each individual.  But there are certain core principles that we can all benefit from.  For example, when a financial storm is coming that is not the time to be blowing thousands of dollars on vacations and new toys.  You would be surprised at how many people there are that claim that they have no extra money in their budgets and yet somehow have plenty of money to run down to Wal-Mart and buy a big stack of DVDs.  When times are difficult, each hard-earned dollar becomes much more precious, and we all need to start getting into the habit of making the most out of our limited resources.  The seemingly endless prosperity that we have all been enjoying for decades is coming to an end, and most of us have absolutely no experience on how to deal with truly hard times.  If you are under the age of 60, it might be a really good idea to read a book or two on what conditions were like during the Great Depression of the 1930s.  There is a lot that we can learn from our own history.

Obamacare: The Road to Repeal Starts in the States. by Michael F. Cannon

States that have refused to implement the Obama health law have already blocked $80 billion of its new deficit spending. If more states follow suit, they can block the other $1.6 trillion and force Congress to repeal the law.

The law relies on states to implement two of its most essential pieces: health-insurance "exchanges" and a vast expansion of Medicaid. Exchanges are government agencies through which the law channels $800 billion to private health-insurance companies.
The Medicaid expansion adds another $900 billion to the federal debt, with private insurers again taking a slice. States are under no obligation either to implement either. Responsible state officials will say no to both.
It is a myth that creating an exchange gives states more control over their insurance markets. Yes, the law directs the federal government to create one in states that do not. But every exchange must be approved by federal bureaucrats, empowering them to impose whatever oppressive rules on "state-run" exchanges they would impose through a federal exchange.

France Doubles Down on Big Government

Obama Is No Clinton. by Michael D. Tanner

Lately President Obama has done everything except seduce an intern in his attempt to morph into Bill Clinton. In virtually every speech, he invokes Clinton's name, trying to link his policies with those of the popular former president. He has even called upon Clinton to place Obama's name in nomination at the Democratic National Convention.

But, try as he might, Barack Obama, is no Bill Clinton.
President Obama says that he wants to raise taxes back to the level they were under Clinton, but that's not quite true. Under President Obama's proposal, the top tax bracket would be raised to 39.6 percent. The president has also called for phasing out high-income taxpayers' itemized deductions, adding another 1.2 percentage points to the effective tax rate, bringing it to 40.8 percent. Add in the 2.9 percent Medicare tax and the top marginal rate would be 43.7 percent, roughly equal to what it was during the Clinton years. But Obamacare would increase the Medicare tax for high-wage earners to 3.8 percent, pushing the top marginal tax rate under the Obama plan to 44.6 percent, nearly a full point higher than it was under Clinton.

A Look at China’s ‘Political Meritocracy’

By Michael Mazza 

A system of above-average ability with below-average virtue.

Can the democratic United States draw lessons from one-party China to improve the American political system? Yes, says Tsinghua University professor Daniel A. Bell, writing for The Christian Science Monitor. Put simply, his argument is that (a) “political meritocracy” is in many ways a superior system to liberal democracy; (b) the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which runs the Chinese government, is a meritocratic system; and (c) by the transitive property, China’s political system is in many ways superior to America’s. “Democracy is a flawed political system,” Bell writes, “and meritocracy can help to remedy some of its flaws.”

George Orwell, Call Your Office

By John Steele Gordon 

Intellectuals, especially in the social sciences, have a nasty habit of thinking that, 'This is the way the world should be, therefore this is the way the world can be.'

Sometimes the mind just boggles.
The Atlantic has an article this month with the title “Americans Want to Live in a Much More Equal Country (They Just Don’t Realize It).” I am always curious when intellectuals announce that the people (who in the American constitutional system serve as the sovereign power) don’t know what’s good for them (What’s the Matter with Kansas?) or don’t even know what they want.
Implicit in all of these revelations, of course, is the firmest, if never directly expressed, belief of the Left: That the average person is too stupid to run his own life, let alone make public policy decisions. Those few, those happy few, that band of liberal intellectuals, must do that for them.

Obama’s welfare debacle

By Jennifer Rubin

Mitt Romney is hammering President Obama on welfare reform, and for good reason. The 1996 welfare reform legislation was overwhelmingly popular, was a great bipartisan achievement, stands as a policy success and comports with Americans’ deepest values about personal responsibility and the work ethic. And Obama tosses that aside, for reasons that still seem perplexing. Is there some anti-work welfare contingent out there? It’s inexplicable both on policy and political grounds.
So Romney is taking full advantage. He was in Illinois yesterday:
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/XRQGZnT-Tyo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Tariffs as Welfare-State Economics

by Gary North

[LewRockwell.com]

I have found over the years that when I debate with people who promote tariffs, meaning sales taxes on imported goods that are enforced by people with badges and guns, they always adopt arguments that apply only to America's side of the border. They refuse to adopt those very same arguments for people on the other side of the border.
I challenge defenders of tariffs to state their arguments in terms of both of the people who want to trade, not just the American. The ethics and economics of restricted trade surely apply to the person who wants to trade on the other side of the invisible line known as a national border. If the arguments for restricted trade apply to the American economy, then surely they apply to the other nation's economy. Logic and ethics do not change just because we cross an invisible judicial line. I take this position because I want the pro-tariff person to face the implications of his position.