Pope Francis pontificates, calls for legitimate redistribution of economic benefits by the State

In front of the UN this morning, quoted at length and discussed here:

"[E]quitable economic and social progress can only be attained by joining scientific and technical abilities with an unfailing commitment to solidarity accompanied by a generous and disinterested spirit of gratuitousness at every level. A contribution to this equitable development will also be made both by international activity aimed at the integral human development of all the world’s peoples and by the legitimate redistribution of economic benefits by the State, as well as indispensable cooperation between the private sector and civil society."

Ed Morrissey tap dances all around this:

"It’s clear, though, that he wasn’t calling for widespread and massive confiscation of wealth by governments."

Yes he is, while calling for it at every level knowing that that's not going to happen, and hiding behind the word "legitimate", a qualification foreign to the language of Jesus on the subject. 

Well, you first. The pope, the Vatican and the people of the Roman Catholic faith should take the lead: Let the redistribution begin with them, with the enormous wealth of the church. When we see them impoverishing themselves for the sake of the poor perhaps we'll take this more seriously.

Until then, this is just more pontificating.

What part of "that ye have" don't they understand?

"Sell that ye have and give alms." -- Luke 12:33

Rick Santorum is right: Conservatism is about the family, and libertarianism isn't about enough

Blue Collar Conservatives, reviewed here:

A blithe attitude about economic disruption and the decline of traditional industries goes along with what Santorum sees as a philosophical overemphasis on individualism. Conservatives, he argues, have neglected an important strand of political thought in which the family is the fundamental unit of the polis.

“The basic unit of the society is the family,” he writes, not “the individual.” Liberty in America shouldn’t mean just “freedom from” coercion, he argues, but “freedom for” — for Americans to do the right thing, to choose the virtuous and Godly course. That, he explains, is the properly understood meaning of the right to “pursuit of happiness.” (He takes this up in American Patriots, his recent book of exempla from the Revolutionary period divided into defenders of life, defenders of liberty, and defenders of “the pursuit of happiness,” i.e., virtue.)

Santorum explicitly blames libertarians for the rise of individualism, but it’s hard not to feel as if he’s taking issue with most of his party. ...

Our brilliant masters raised the cost of youth labor by 41% in the teeth of the financial crisis, decimating their employment by 43%

The current deficit in the general employment level is about 1.55 million below the July 2007 peak (all figures are not-seasonally-adjusted as published by stlouisfed.org). Since the measurement typically is at its highest in the summers, it looks likely that after seven years we are finally going to dig out of this hole this coming summer. Swings up 2 to 4 million from the winter lows to the summer highs are not unusual for this measurement.

That said, deficits in the levels for some age groups remain, and reveal how far behind the employment level remains even as population has increased over the period by an additional 16 million.

The question is why.

Most importantly, workers in the core of the working age population 25-54 years old are today 5.7 million fewer in number than they were at their November 2007 peak, which is the largest deficit by age group.

The oldest of these workers today were born in 1960 when births per 1000 women were still 23.7. The youngest were born in 1989 when births per 1000 women had plummeted to 16.4. But it wasn't until 1965 that births fell below 20 per 1000. That means there are only five tranches left in the measurement today from the high birth rate years 1960-1964 inclusive, whereas seven years ago the picture was a little different. We had seven more high birth rate years represented than we do today. Those aged 54 seven years ago were born in 1953 when births per 1000 were pushing 25. Births per year from 1955 through 1964 reached as high as 4.27 million in 1961. Contrast that with 1973 through 1976 when births crashed to 3.1 million per year, a deficit of 4 million over just those four years compared to the pre-1965 levels.

It appears therefore that the fall-off in the employment level of those 25-54 can be explained entirely by the aging of their cohort in which many millions over the last seven years have moved on to the next level, and by the failure of the younger members of this group to bring up the rear in terms of their aggregate numbers because there just weren't enough of them born. The reason for the decline of their employment level is therefore structural, not economic, and will continue to be so for the next five years.

Indeed, workers aged 55 and older have escaped a decline in their employment level. There are in fact 6.9 million more working at this age right now in 2014 than there were exactly seven years ago, which is what one would expect from the data. The Baby Boom is simply aging and continuing to work as it did before, and it has a lot of room left to run.

If there is an economic problem revealed by the employment level, it has to do with the youngest workers.

Consider teenagers 16-19: 3.2 million fewer teenagers are working today in that age range than at their pre-recession peak in July 2006 at 7.5 million. That's a 43% decline in teenage employment levels in almost 8 years, an utter catastrophe which has nothing to do with demographics. Birth rates have held steady between 1987 and 1998 at 15.4 per 1000.

Unfortunately, teenagers paid the biggest price because in the teeth of the first economic depression in the post-war this country decided it would be a good idea to raise the minimum wage in 2007, again in 2008, and again in 2009. When wages came under severe pressure for every other age group and millions took pay cuts just to keep working, our brilliant masters decided to raise the cost of youth labor by 41% since 2006. And then the dopes voted for a guy who wants to raise the cost of their labor another 39%.

  

College age workers 20-24 by contrast, are in deficit from July 2007 by only 0.8 million.

The declines for the three age groups of 9.7 million minus the gain of 6.9 million for those 55 and older implies a net loss of 2.8 million in the employment level, impacting workers primarily 16-19.

If you want less of something, tax it. And that's what the minimum wage is, a tax on labor which reduces the quantity of it naturally.

After the holocaust of Jews, a holocaust of Germans at the hands of the victors

Remembered in After the Reich, reviewed here:

[Giles MacDonogh's] best estimate is that some three million Germans died unnecessarily after the official end of hostilities. A million soldiers vanished before they could creep back to the holes that had been their homes. The majority of them died in Soviet captivity (of the 90,000 who surrendered at Stalingrad, only 5,000 eventually came home) but, shamingly, many thousands perished as prisoners of the Anglo-Americans. Herded into cages along the Rhine, with no shelter and very little food, they dropped like flies. Others, more fortunate, toiled as slave labour in a score of Allied countries, often for years. Incredibly, some Germans were still being held in Russia as late as 1979.

The two million German civilians who died were largely the old, women and children: victims of disease, cold, hunger, suicide - and mass murder.

Apart from the well-known repeated rape of virtually every girl and woman unlucky enough to be in the Soviet occupation zones, perhaps the most shocking outrage recorded by MacDonogh - for the first time in English - is the slaughter of a quarter of a million Sudeten Germans by their vengeful Czech compatriots. The survivors of this ethnic cleansing, naked and shivering, were pitched across the border, never to return to their homes. Similar scenes were seen across Poland, Silesia and East Prussia as age-old German communities were brutally expunged.

With housing ATM shut down, Americans tapped retirements prematurely in 2011 to the tune of $57 billion

So says the story here at Bloomberg, extrapolating using the basic early withdrawal penalty rate of 10%:

It’s a small number that’s part of a much larger picture: The Internal Revenue Service collected $5.7 billion in 2011 from penalties, meaning that Americans took out about $57 billion from retirement funds before they were supposed to.

The median size of a 401(k) is $24,400 as of March 31, with people older than 55 having $65,300, according to Fidelity Investments. Those funds can disappear quickly in retirement, and the early withdrawals indicate that the coming retirement crisis could be even more acute than expected. ...

Meanwhile, the amount of home-equity loans outstanding was $704 billion in 2013, down 38 percent from the 2007 peak, according to Federal Reserve data. ...

During the 2008 campaign, President Barack Obama proposed allowing penalty-free withdrawals of up to $10,000 from retirement accounts. That idea went nowhere and wasn’t included in the 2009 economic stimulus.

In 2012, the New York State Society of Certified Public Accountants proposed a temporary waiver of the penalties while families were recovering from the recession.

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Actually the premature withdrawals could have been significantly higher than $57 billion in 2011. There are many exceptions to the 10% penalty rule, one of which is for withdrawals to pay for health insurance premia, which began jumping in the wake of the passage of ObamaCare in March 2010. Careful taxpayers withdrew exactly for that growing expense, paid no penalty and in certain circumstances also deducted the expense from income when self-employed. Since those sums escaped the 10% penalty, additional sums withdrawn probably contributed to the total penalties collected in 2011.

Obsessed with Congress' flaws, Justin Amash finds himself alienated from Republicans as a libertarian crank

The Detroit News here highlights how in "Michigan GOP leaves Justin Amash to fend for himself", including this from Mike Rogers who evidently feels more free to speak because he's baggin' it:

Rogers has sparred with Amash on foreign policy intervention and fought off an Amash attempt last year to curb the National Security Agency phone surveillance program. Rogers points to Amash’s lack of support on Iran sanctions, a vote against a balanced budget amendment and the “embrace” of isolationism that’s “not consistent with what’s in the best interest of the future of the United States. I just worry you have somebody who’s more concerned about their brand than the substance of the issues,” Rogers said.

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Congress' flaws are legion, but their remedy is not libertarianism. Their remedy is in representation.

In his zeal for the constitution Justin Amash has little to say about representation, perhaps because he represents the libertarian interests of a few, not the broader interests of his constituents. Which is odd, since lack of representation was the key complaint of the founding era which wrote it.

Today we have a Congress which is an artifact of the 1920s, not of the founding era. Representation has ceased to grow with population since the 1920 Census, by an act of Congress itself, the effect of which has been to turn the Congress into a powerful oligarchy arrayed against the great masses of the unwashed taxpayers whose wallets are plundered by it.

The Tea Party would be more convincing if it actually believed in a more representative Congress, which means a far more numerous Congress than the 435 member one we have now. So far we haven't seen the Tea Party demonstrate passion for any such thing, even from its preeminent leaders like Justin Amash who claim to be inspired by everything constitutional, except for representation at the level of one per 30,000.

Americans hate their Congress in unprecedented numbers, and the reason is because their individual representatives don't speak for them.

If the Tea Party had any genuineness to it, it would make fixing that job #1. 

The myth of the American holocaust: There were 4 million slaves in the US in 1860, yet "millions" were murdered

Math . . . hard to figure.

Story here:

“Its symbolism in history is directly linked to the enslavement, torture and murder of millions of Americans,” Hall said of the Confederate flag. “The state of California should not be in the business of promoting hate toward others.”

When you consider that in 1860 prime male field hands went for between $1,200 and $1,800 each, it is incredible to believe that such large numbers of slaves were murdered.

Liberals still imagine conservative Democrats just evaporated when they actually became Republicans

Liberal Peter Beinart admits Republicans hate Obama because he's a Democrat, not because he's black, but still can't accept it that the Democrat Party left the southerners, not southerners the Democrat Party, here:

I’m not claiming racism is irrelevant to Republican opposition to Obama. Race is a constant presence in American politics, and it’s impossible to understand either political party without it. But the right’s strategy of militantly opposing, and sometimes delegitimizing, Democratic presidents stretches back two decades now. It has its roots in the end of the Cold War, which stripped Americans of a common enemy; in the fragmentation of media that once spanned ideological divides and now exacerbates them; and in the near-extinction of the southern conservative Democrats and northern liberal Republicans who once helped broker political compromise.

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And you'd think he'd see the victory in this instead of the defeat, because Democrats joining the Republican Party have done far more to liberalize it, and the nation as a whole, than Republicans have done to "conservatize" the new arrivals. The constant leftward drift of politics since the Reagan era proves that, especially in the realm of social policy.

Conservative traitor Bush 41 ACCEPTS JFK Profile in Courage Award for breaking no new taxes promise

To Democrats the only good Republican is the traitor to his own kind. It is enough of an insult that George Herbert Walker Bush was given the award, but the real outrage is that he accepted it.

Story here:

"Candidly speaking, my grandfather didn't want to raise taxes," Lauren Bush said as she accepted the award. "But ... he felt he owed the American people action and results. Compromise is a dirty word in Washington today. ... But once we get back to realizing the importance of actual governance, I suspect this too will pass.". . . The award is named for Kennedy's 1957 book, Profiles in Courage, which tells the stories of eight U.S. senators who took unpopular stands.

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The farce of the award is that the Kennedy clan still doesn't have the courage to admit that JFK didn't write it:

John F. Kennedy is credited as its author, but there are credible allegations that most of it was the work of his speechwriter, Theodore Sorensen.

The loyalty of libertarians, as with other ideologues, is to something other than borders, language and culture

Mike "Mish" Shedlock, here, who has no home, no country, no roots anywhere which are not exposed to the withering glare of libertarian "principle":

According to Gabrielė "From soap operas to ballet performances, the Russian government is doing everything to influence the cultural life of Eastern Europe, and to maintain a stranglehold on the mentality of the people."

Let's assume that is true. Here is an equally true statement "From soap operas to ballet performances, the EU is doing everything to influence the cultural life of all of Europe, and to maintain a stranglehold on the mentality of the people."

Here's another "The US is doing everything to everyone globally, and by military force where necessary, to maintain a hypocritical stranglehold on any country that dares go against the vision of the United States."

It's time to treat the rich like equals: Dean Kalahar speaks up for proportional taxation

Here, although the ahistorical reading of Scripture by liberals on behalf of progressive taxation is hardly new:

Proportional taxes actually meet the equity and ability to pay principles of effective, efficient, and "fair" taxes. With a proportional tax everyone pays the same percentage but those who earn or spend more pay more. For example: if you buy a $50,000 car and the Fair/proportional tax is 10%, then you pay $5,000 in tax. If, on the other hand, you buy a $5,000 car, your tax is $500. By paying the same percentage, everyone is offered the dignity of being treated equally, and those who afford more pay more. Isn't that what liberals are always demanding?

"We have to raise the progressive tax rate so the "rich" pay their "fair share."

In reality, progressive tax rates, like the federal income tax, might meet the ability to pay principle but not the equity principle. Progressive taxes have varied tax rate percentages depending on income so taxpayers are not treated equally. Currently the top 20% of income earners pay more than 90% of the income taxes, while the bottom 50% pays less than 3% of the income taxes. Who's actually "paying their fair share?"

Robert Tracinski has been reading The Bible

It turns out Robert Tracinski is both an atheist and a libertarian, which makes perfectly good sense. I think he gets just one mention here on the blog before this. It turns out he's been reading the Bible.

Story here and here.

I wonder how long it will take him to discover that his own conception of Western-style individualism is also the product of a madman. 

Under Democrat rule the level of America's core workers aged 25 to 54 remains 5.662 million below the 2007 peak

The peak level of workers aged 25 to 54 was 101,083,000 in November 2007. In April 2014 the level was 95,421,000.

Under 6+ years of Democrat rule, full time employment remains 5.146 million below the 2007 peak

Peak full time employment was 123,219,000 in July 2007. Almost seven years later full time stands at 118,073,000. If we are lucky this summer full time will hit 120 million.

Not seasonally adjusted, total nonfarm employment remains 1.115 million below the November 2007 peak

Peak was 139,443,000 on November 1, 2007. On April 1, 2014 the level stood at 138,288,000.

The agony under rule by Democrats: 75 months later, 6.25 years, employment remains 113,000 short of the previous peak in 2007

For a graph and discussion, see Calculated Risk, here:

"This shows the depth of the recent employment recession - worse than any other post-war recession - and the relatively slow recovery due to the lingering effects of the housing bust and financial crisis." 

For a second graph and discussion, see here:

"This graph shows the job losses from the start of the employment recession, in percentage terms - this time aligned at maximum job losses.  At the recent pace of improvement, it appears employment will be back to pre-recession levels next month (Of course this doesn't include population growth)."

Unemployment plummets to 6.3%, 288,000 jobs are added in April and the stock market just shrugs its shoulders

The employment situation report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for April 2014 is here.

806,000 people dropped out of the labor force in April (seasonally adjusted), many of whom likely caused the unemployment rate to plunge 0.4 points to 6.3%. Fewer people not counted as unemployed even though they were unemployed makes the headline number drop. The not-seasonally-adjusted number leaving the civilian labor force was 782,000.

People are making too much of this data point, however. Granted, the drop was large for a March to April cycle. But key is that the civilian labor force level always peaks in July each year and then declines and rises again to a new high. It is not appreciated that a new all time high in the civilian labor force level was reached just last July at 157,196,000. True, the pace of achieving new peak levels was arrested after July 2008. Adding about 1.5 million to the labor force each summer as in the past would mean we should have been at about 163.8 million in the summer of 2013. We were off that pace by 6 million. The April 2014 level, however, was higher than the April 2013 level, which was higher than the April 2012 level, which was higher than the April 2011 level. The point is the civilian labor force level is climbing out of its hole, and the peaks and valleys prove it. When they stop proving it we should be concerned.

The 288,000 added to payrolls in April stands in vivid relief against the 190,000 average added to payrolls per month in the preceding twelve months. The employment level of those who are 25-54 years old surged 321,000 to 95,421,000, still almost 6 million under the November 2007 high. At 288,000 per month for a year, one could easily add almost 3.5 million to payrolls and in two years return the levels of those of prime working age to the previous peak.

Per hour earnings for all employees did not rise and remained flat. That is concerning, but at least production and nonsupervisory employees saw an increase.

The Case Shiller Home Price Index Shows Housing Prices Almost 20% Above The Long Term Mean Level

The current level of the Case Shiller Home Price Index is 152.48 and the mean level is 127.51.

About 140 on the index looks like the historical high water mark beyond which housing appears to be in a bubble, meaning we are in one.

Given the scale of the recent extreme housing bubble, housing should not have been prevented from correcting fully, probably well below 120, in order to reset the market on a surer basis. That might have prevented the current escalation in prices, which are unaffordable to almost everyone beneath upper middle class income levels of around $76,000.

Recent tirades against income inequality forget that the bottom half of the population typically has most of what wealth it has tied up in housing and is not well diversified. Loss of homes and home equity have been major drivers of income inequality under Barack Obama, compounded by loss of employment and housing policy inattention, even as stock markets have been driven higher by nominally positive policy through Obama's Federal Reserve chairs.

Obama sent money, after all, to Aunt Zeituni's family to help with her funeral, but he did not attend, and went golfing instead.

Are Democrats fanatical about abortion rights for unstated racist reasons?

Seen here:

New Jersey city council chairman and mayoral candidate Marie Strumolo Burke was caught on tape lamenting her city’s descent into a “fucking nigger town” — and nearly all media reports failed to identify her as a Democrat. Burke is chairman of Belleville, New Jersey’s city council and is running for mayor in the town’s June election. And yes, she is a member of the Democratic Party. In an undated recording of a voicemail left by a former council chairman, Burke’s voice can be heard in the background “discussing” proposed changes to the town’s tax rates. “This is terrible. This is terrible,” she can be heard moaning in the background. “This is gonna be a fucking nigger town!”

Catastrophic Q1 2014 GDP report at 0.1% makes 21 quarterly reports under Obama averaging just 1.76% each

The latest GDP report is here.

The decline in GDP in Q1 to 0.1% annualized was from 2.6% annualized in Q4 2013, a whopping 96% free fall. In other words, the economy did a panic stop, slamming on the brakes and hitting the wall.

Blaming it on the winter, for those of us who've seen more than fifty of them north of the Mason-Dixon Line, is laughable beyond belief. We don't hibernate like bears up here. We get up early and blow the snow off the 200 feet of driveway and get on with our day.

Here's the truth: Quarter on quarter durable goods consumption crashed over 70%, nondurable over 95%. Real nonresidential fixed investment was a catastrophe, the spread plummeting 136%. Residential investment added a decline of 5.7% to the previous quarter's decline of 7.9%. Exports went deep sea diving, the spread down 180% quarter on quarter, and the spread for imports was down even more, 193%. A slight uptick in government spending kept GDP barely positive.  

Five years of GDP reports under Obama have averaged just 1.24% per year, so the sixth year is off to a terrible start at 0.1%.

Eight years of GDP reports under Bush averaged 2.13% per year, pretty lame all by itself but 1.7 times better than Obama so far.

I'd take it in a heartbeat.