Monthly Archives: July 2011

As much as I despise retail shopping, I have two guilty pleasures in this regard: hardware stores and book stores, both of which can hook me for as long as my wife will tolerate.  She is far more patient in book stores because we share the attachment.  In the romantic comedy, “You’ve Got Mail”, Tom Hank’s mega corporate bookstore puts Meg Ryan’s “The Shop Around The Corner” out of business.  Like its 1940 forbear, Tom and Meg fall in love as e-pen pals, just as Jimmy Stuart and Margaret Sullavan fell in love in the original movie as snail mail correspondents.  In the real world, however, so many shops around so many corners felt the axe when Borders or Barnes & Noble set up down the street with few regrets from the big company.   I have fond memories among the shelves of those specialty stores.

Friday, Borders itself failed to emerge from last winter’s Chapter 11, and all their stores began final liquidation sales.  E-readers, Amazon, the expense of running brick and mortar stores and the intense schedules of harried shoppers spending more of our discretionary income on the internet were too much to overcome.  Their late entry into e-commerce, unlike Amazon and B&N, left Borders laboring to catch up, and they never did.

Will the eccentric bibliophiles who tend to staff even the corporate stores slide off into impracticality and the ranks of structural  unemployment?  I most ardently hope not.  We will be culturally poorer for the loss.  Along with librarians, these engaging, lovely folks are resources that enrich our lives.  In our home, we buy, borrow and read fifty or more books a year, and add another dozen or more as gifts.  How gloomy it will be to bid farewell to pleasant browsing of friendly books among kindred spirits.  As regular buyers of books on line (some from Borders) and an ardent e-reader user, I feel a bit complicit in their obsolescence.

If these gentle souls join typewriter repairers, wagon wheelwrights and many who once worked in our factories in that most intractable category of structural unemployment, they will add to an increasingly troublesome segment.  Estimates are that upwards of 8 points of the 9.2 points of unemployment rate consist of those who need work but have skills which are necessary less and less frequently.  Following the recent financial crisis, the United States added double the percentage of its citizens to the unemployed than any other Western country.  Some of these were cyclical, albeit long term, in construction and housing related  categories, but an alarmingly large group cannot find work doing jobs in which they were once so capable because those jobs have been displaced by technological advance or off shore competition.  They are structurally unemployed.

One of the most distressing aspects of the persistent high jobless rate is the long duration laid off workers spend looking and hoping and looking some more.  Some simply give up; others acclimate to unemployment and extended benefits.  They are discouraged and fenced in by limited or specialized (and increasingly less needed) skills in the accelerating pace of change in business.  That curve is likely to continue to steepen.  The percentage increase of structural unemployment among those looking for work for more than twenty six weeks is far greater than the increase in structural unemployment for those who have found jobs in less time.

The current administration has done precious little to address this crisis.  New manufacturing and new products require substantial capital investment, which is indispensable to generate competitive productivity.  This expense will create well paying jobs, or at least jobs which deliver sustainable income.  The ruinously expensive and feckless efforts of the Obama  administration focus on quick fix, unshovel ready jobs and fattening the minions of government to enforce and ladle on job killing regulations.

Misnamed health care reform and thousands of pages of new regulations to implement an ideological agenda bring about burdens crushing growth in private business.  The long term, serious work of encouraging cash investment waits largely ignored.  Political posturing, spin, hissy fit press conferences and blame placing frustrate those who would innovate and those who sit and wait.

We will persist, however, in hope and to read and to learn.  My wife, Rita, remains resolutely faithful to paper and bound books; many, however, are dropped on the back porch by FedEx.  She gets regular thank you cards from Amazon.  As is my habit, I stockpile a small treasury of books to enjoy on my vacation in late August.  Already three are set aside with great anticipation:
ready to read on my Nook.

We face an organized, well funded and pervasive effort to separate God from government.  The separation of Church and State is a baseline tenet of our Constitution.  However, an objective student of American history knows the intent of the Bill of Rights was not to sever God from American life, but to proscribe a state sponsored church as was the case in England at the time of the Constitution. This unhappy marriage leads to censorship, persecution and prejudice, if not violence. Many came to the Americas to seek the freedom to worship as they pleased.

Constitutional separation of Church and State notwithstanding, it was implicit in the worldview of the founding fathers and  authors of the Constitution that faith and human consciences formed in moral principles were inherent to the functioning of a democracy. Whether Deist like Thomas Jefferson or committed traditional Christian like John Adams, all agreed that a healthy and vibrant republic would persist provided the citizenry who governed (and their representatives) were educated on the issues and shared unyielding common moral values fostering honesty, hard work, keeping promises and active, informed participation in self rule.

Only a population which agrees on universal virtues, embraces necessary self sacrifice and eschews unbridled self-interest is worthy and able to govern itself over time.   Absent these virtues, as de Tocqueville aptly observed, democracy risks collapsing into anarchy, tyranny or some uncontrolled variation of mob rule (e.g. The French Revolution or the carnage of the 1918 Russian White and Red Armies).   The essential soundness of mind, spirit and faith of the American people enabled and ennobled the great American experiment.

To attempt to disconnect our discourse in the public square from faith is dangerous in the short term, and fatal in the long term.   Amusing atheism full of the glib, caustic wit of ‘plausible liars’ is well entrenched in academia and popular media.  This deluge has “educated” our young people for two or more generations. Vigilance, discernment and knowledge are central to our cultural survival.  As the old sergeant on “Hill Street Blues” used to say, “Be careful out there!”

A muddle of “I’m OK, You’re OK – every stray opinion is of equal value” lives out there in books, movies, TV, magazines and the internet.   Fertile ground is created for the kind of confusion that prevails in clever wordplay on the topic.  In other quarters religion has been downgraded to feel good soporifics. Little wonder why the young are uncertain and adopt what is easy – doing nothing.  Why commit to or be challenged by or form their consciences on cotton candy: sweet, pretty and utterly devoid of substance?

Our culture seems to have fallen into a disturbing contradiction:  we love things, and use people.  In that darkness, we will benefit by perceiving the light of the Ten Commandments not as strictures or fun spoilers or prissy; they are guidelines to growing in virtue.  As woeful as we can be at living virtuous lives, we incrementally progress in this lifelong pursuit only through relationships – with God and with each other.  In the process of grinding and polishing our way to virtue through relationships, we make it possible to live together with mutual support in a political structure called democracy.  Virtue gives our lives worth and the structure to embrace freedom.  Without virtue, democracy seeks order in dangerous places and will be lost in one tyranny or another.

That helpless sensation when we read the political news originates in the misunderstanding that one person’s voice is lost in the cacophony that threatens to overwhelm all public discourse. The sensation is real; the underlying perception is not. On a local level, while legislators are beleaguered with fund raising and reelection, most of them remain sensitive to their constituency. If you truly want an education, spend a few dollars and attend a fund raiser: what is humorously labeled ‘a time’ in little Rhody. Access is cheap.

If specific legislation elicits more than a couple of phone calls or emails to a local legislator, their interest is piqued. When an issue prompts a dozen or twenty constituents to weigh in, the hallway whispers and nervous cell phone calls can pass a tipping point. The scramble to a safe harbor will alter a vote or relegate newly proposed, damaging law to a quiet death in committee. Threatened with a looming vote for which they will be accountable to the electorate, many politicians will opt to cut a coffee shop deal, avoiding a potentially exposed position.

Anyone who has testified at a public hearing of a state level House or Senate subcommittee probably has witnessed the arrogance of power or experienced the derision visited upon the citizen who dares to challenge those who hold it. Irrespective of the gauntlet, fear of public embarrassment, even humiliation, is not justification for lacking the courage to speak up. The correct response to the self satisfied incumbent is to give them pause with the united voices of a committed few.

In the Book of Judges, God directs Gideon to reduce his army of 22,000 to defend His people from the hoards of Midian, Amalek and the Kedemites. The first cut to 10,000 sent home all who were not experienced, courageous warriors, any who were afraid. The Lord told Gideon that even fewer were needed for His purpose. The final winnowing seems at first to be mysterious: He instructed Gideon to observe his troops after a long hot day, when they came to a source of water. Those that knelt to drink with their face in the water were sent home; those who scooped the water to their mouths and lapped it from their hand were retained for the battle. What is the significance of this screening?

With no informed theological basis I believe the criteria were these: those that lapped the water from their hand remained watchful and wary; they controlled their thirst to maintain vigilance against threats. Self control, intelligent observation, relentless watchfulness. All were warriors; only three hundred did what was necessary. The few remaining were sufficient. They still are.

With some notable and well targeted exceptions, President Obama has dialed down His Agenda for the ramp up of his reelection campaign.  In order to secure his voter base, he focuses on fund-raising and the continuation of his class warfare theme.  Finding sufficient votes beyond his base – the white, liberal independents that bled away since 2008, well, that will need his best efforts to feint towards the center and assuage the fears fired up in the trickery and single-mindedness of passing the health care usurpation.

His fund-raising events break all records. In his first year of office he attended 22 fund-raisers; President G.W. Bush held six in his first year. The pace continues unabated including three fund-raisers this past weekend, while government spending similarly breaks all records. Meanwhile the debate stagnates in the legislature to  manage our astonishing deficit. The Obama deficit alone this year exceeds the entire federal budget of FY 2000. With default looming, the gold standard of bonds, U.S. Treasuries, is in danger of being downgraded by Moody’s and Standard & Poors for the first time ever because of the size and growth rate of the nation’s debt – almost $50,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. Each of us has another mortgage. We are on track to become Greece.

Big government with money to spend and voters to control, Keynesian economics gone wild, is a mainstay of the Democrat and Presidential program. In the face of all evidence, Democrat leadership is inextricably caught up in the credo that professionally managed bureaucracy (an oxymoron, if ever there was one) under the control of a liberal/socialist leaning government will solve all our problems. Ratcheting up inexorably the degree of authority necessary to leverage this unworkable miracle is inevitable: that authority is what they crave and that is what we have at stake in the 2012 election.

Ms. Pelosi famously stated, we need to pass the bill (Obamacare) to know what’s in it. As we learn more and more of the details including the virtually unrestrained power of the Independent Payment Advisory Board and the staggering costs layered into the bill, it becomes increasingly clear, we were hoodwinked once again. A McKinsey & Company report in June upped to 78 million their estimate of currently privately insured citizens that will be cut loose by their employers. The numbers are simple: the average small business cost to the company after employee contributions for health insurance is $4,150 for a single plan and $9,773 for a family. Many already struggling small businesses can opt for a $2,000 fine per employee and consign them to the exchanges. If they have fewer than 50 employees, they get an exemption from even that fine. It is no surprise that the National Center for Policy Analysis projects those to be dumped into the exchanges at between 87 and 117 million. The original Congressional Budget Office used the administration’s assumptions of 24 million covered by the new exchanges, of which only 9 to 10 million would be due to losing their coverage with their employer.

With the original administration numbers, the CBO estimated $500 billion in additional Federal spending over the first decade of the plan. Using the McKinsey numbers or the NCPA projections, the costs in reality will fall between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion: unaffordable costs to layer on to the already unfettered burden. Obamacare has to go; it won’t go as long as its author remains in the White House and Harry Reid remains leading the Senate.

The Democrat dominated House, Senate and Executive branch failed to pass a budget in two years. No budget – like trying to manage a household with no regard to spending, no relationship between income and expense, maxing out the credit cards until they’ll take no more. The newly Republican led House passed a budget within months of having the votes. Yet the response of our President to fiscally responsible, necessary spending cuts proposed by House leadership is to insult our intelligence and play to his voter base with tired rhetoric that spending cuts must be accompanied by tax increases (or his even more tired cliché, revenue enhancement).

His proposed solutions?  Class warfare.

Get rid of tax shelters for the rich: most repeated refrain from President Obama is to eliminate the deduction for corporate jets and oil drilling subsidies. Could there be a more cynical, emotional chord to play for the almost 50% of lower income voters who pay no taxes now, most of whom are Democrat voters? Charles Krauthammer recently ran the numbers. Getting rid of the corporate jet deduction would completely cover one year of Obama deficit (not annual spending, just the borrowing), if those dollars had been collected since the time of Jesus – 2,000 years. The oil drilling subsidies (tax credits to encourage domestic energy production) would cover one year of Obama deficit in 700 years. If we put in place both “tax increases to the rich” and collect the extra dollars for 100 years, we’ll handle the Obama deficit for February. But this mantra makes for strong, outraged sound bites for his voter base, and does nothing to discuss seriously the hard decisions necessary to shrink government spending.

To raise taxes on everyone making more than $200,000, another favorite Obama refrain, would indeed cover the deficit, if only each one of them would pony up an additional $3.5 million a year. Among successful small business owners, who make more than $200,000 and generate the majority of new private sector jobs, the uncertainty about the fiscal future, future taxes and the profligate regulations produced by the Dodd/Frank financial reform bill, the EPA and Obamacare has paralyzed new job formation in that critical segment.  The president promised his stimulus bill of just under $1 trillion in borrowed or printed money (another clichéd euphemism – quantitative easing), would keep the unemployment rate below 8% with ‘shovel ready’ jobs. The unemployment rate  rocketed to above 10% and settled back into a firm 9.1%.

No solutions beyond grabbing more of the citizenry’s money, he continues to fan the flames of class divisiveness accompanied by crippling debt and unemployment. The country has paid a heavy price for the inexperience and doctrinaire left ideology many feared from this president. It is past due to rectify that mistake.

Favorite current bumper sticker: 2012, End of an Error.