My Blog

Author: jbosco

  • The Rich Are Getting Poorer

    Trouble for those “Tax the Rich!” folks:

    For the first time in history, rich people are actually getting poorer, and luxury retailers are freaking out about it.  …

    “Because these same consumers are significantly invested in their high-end lifestyle with income committed to a wide-range of fixed expenses to maintain that lifestyle, it’s in discretionary spending where they are going to take their cuts. So that translates into less money to spend each month for clothes, shoes and handbags, jewelry and home decorative accessories. These folks have plenty of all that stuff already, so it is the easiest, most painless way to adjust one’s budget when there is less money coming in each month.”

    via Business Insider.

    Intelligent people already know that government budgets at the city, state, and federal level are so out of whack that even if we EAT THE RICH it’s still not going to make a dent in the deficits.

    Our only hope out of this mess is economic growth… and a little inflation.

    Ugh.

  • DNC Proudly Displays Russian Ships

    On the last night of the Democratic National Convention, a retired Navy four-star took the stage to pay tribute to veterans. Behind him, on a giant screen, the image of four hulking warships reinforced his patriotic message.

    But there was a big mistake in the stirring backdrop: those are Russian warships.  …

    These were the very Soviet-era combatants that Nathman and Cold Warriors like him had once squared off against.  “The ships are definitely Russian,” said noted naval author Norman Polmar after reviewing hi-resolution photos from the event.  “There’s no question of that in my mind.”

    Naval experts concluded the background was a photo composite of Russian ships that were overflown by what appear to be U.S. trainer jets.  It remains unclear how or why the Democratic Party used what’s believed to be images of the Russian Black Sea Fleet at their convention.

    via Navy Times.

    Vladimir Putin must have made a very nice campaign donation to Obama for America.

  • Inner City Kids and a Catholic School

    God Bless John Kass:

    When Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis led her members out on strike this week, she said real school would be closed.

    “Negotiations have been intense but productive,” she said. “However, we have failed to reach an agreement that will prevent a labor strike. Real school will not be open (Monday).”

    Real school? You mean that public system where four of 10 students don’t graduate?

    Since real school wasn’t open, I was compelled to visit an unreal school.A South Side school where 100 percent of the students graduate, and 100 percent are accepted to college. A Roman Catholic all-boys school that draws from poor and working-class neighborhoods, a school where there are no cops or metal detectors, no gang recruitment, no fear.

    An unreal school that is mostly black, but with a smattering of whites and Latinos, and where every student who sees a stranger in the halls goes up to the newcomer, introduces himself, shakes his hand, looks him in the eye and calls him Mister.

    via Chicago Tribune.

    It is unethical and criminal that our children are forced into failing schools when they have the real opportunity to have an excellent education.  Vouchers would make real Obama’s rhetoric of every child having a fair chance.

    Kass exposes the reality of the situation:  this has nothing to due with educating children… it’s about politics.

    For shame.

     

  • Everything (the GOP does) is Racist

    Or at least so says the Left.  Bill Maher is only the latest:

    HBO host and Obama donor Bill Maher has accused journalists like NBC’s Tom Brokaw of encouraging the birther movement by failing to label it as racist.

    In a blog post endorsing Chris Matthews’ recent on-air attack against RNC chairman Reince Priebus during MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Maher accused Brokaw and other reporters of stoking the coals of birtherism by championing “‘balance’ over objectivity,” citing Brokaw’s attempt to defend Mitt Romney’s remark about his birth certificate as an “awkward joke.”

    “How did [birtherism] grow to the point where half of Republican primary voters believed it? It wasn’t just the silence of Republican leaders, it was the failure of people like Tom Brokaw to just dismiss it as racism from the beginning,” Maher wrote.

    via DailyKenn.

    Sometimes the best way to show the absurdity of a position is through comedy.  Meet Bob.

    [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1o0ooNn8Qc?rel=0]

  • Fallout of China’s One Child Policy

    I’d not thought of this:

    … The reason Chinese savings levels are so high is the one-child policy.

    In most developing countries the way that people save is they have multiple children hopefully to generate a gaggle of grandchildren all of whom are trained to respect their elders. Given most people did not live to old age if you did you became a treasured (and well cared for) family member.

    This does not work in China. Longevity in China is increasing rapidly and the one-child policy results in a grandchild potentially having four grandparents to look after. The “four grandparent policy” means the elderly cannot expect to be looked after in old age. Four grandparents, one grand-kid makes abandoning the old-folk looks easy and near certain.

    Nor can the elderly rely on a welfare state to look after them. There is no welfare state.

    So the Chinese save. Unless they save they will starve in old age. This has driven savings levels sometimes north of fifty percent of GDP. Asian savings rates have been high through all the key industrializations (Japan, Korea, Singapore etc). However Chinese savings rates are over double other Asian savings rates – this is the highest savings rate in history and the main cause is the one-child policy.

    via Business Insider.

    Kinda sad the level of social engineering that has taken place in China.

    It is this very savings that permits the Chinese government to buy trillions and trillions of dollars worth of U.S. treasuries.  Should the U.S. drive itself over the cliff (which appears more and more likely) it will cause a world-wide financial meltdown.

    Very sad in so many ways.

  • Then vs. Than

    Then is an adverb referring to a period of time.

    Than is a conjunction used to make a comparison.

    I guess no one should be surprised given that 79% of CPS 8th graders are not proficient in reading.

  • How to Help Black Kids Graduate? Vouchers!

    Since CTU is out on strike, this appears to be timely.

    Educational choice is the civil rights movement of our generation.

    Then look at a breathtaking new study from researchers at the Brookings Institution and Harvard University. Brookings fellow Matthew M. Chingos and Harvard government professor Paul E. Peterson tracked 1,363 New York elementary school students who, starting in 1997, had received vouchers worth up to $1,400 a year through a New York City scholarship fund. Those students had their choice of any private school, religious or secular, in New York.

    Result: African-American students who had used the vouchers were 24 percent more likely to attend college, and more than twice as likely to attend selective four-year colleges, as their peers who had not won the voucher lottery in a random draw. The hard numbers: 45 percent of the African-American students with vouchers graduated and attended college. That’s compared to 36 percent of otherwise similar students who hadn’t received the vouchers.

    Those vouchers didn’t give a similar boost to white or Hispanic students, but did help African-Americans close the customary graduation gap between black and Hispanic students, the researchers reported.

    via Chicago Tribune.

    Poor kids on the South and West sides of the city are stuck in failing schools and Rahm, Obama, and the rest of the Democratic cabal aren’t going to do a damn thing about it.

  • Double-Dipping Payments from the “G”

    As many as 117,000 Americans simultaneously collect unemployment benefits and federal disability each year, a form of double-dipping that investigators say costs taxpayers $850 million annually and should be ended.

    To understand why such “double-dipping” constitutes fraud, please note the following general requirements for each program: To receive unemployment insurance benefit payments, claimants must state that they are able to work. To receive disability insurance benefit payments, claimants must state that they are unable to work.

    via Townhall.

    The article actually points out that because of the significant increase in the number of people on disability the “current projections indicate that the Social Security trust fund for disability will be fully depleted in 2016, just four years from the present.”

    The data appears solid.  Where is the MSM on this story.  Is this not a significant issue in this election cycle?

     

  • Big Money in Freon Smuggling

    I love stories like this; Government run amok.

    The chief executive of the century-old company from America’s heartland shifted nervously on the witness stand here as he tried to explain how a trusted senior vice president had been caught on a wiretap buying half a million dollars in smuggled merchandise, much of it from China.

    But the contraband purchased by Marcone, a St. Louis-based company that claims to be the nation’s largest authorized source for appliance parts, was not counterfeit handbags or fake medicines. It was a colorless gas that provides the chill for air-conditioners from Miami to Mumbai, from Bogotá to Beijing.

    Under an international treaty, the gas, HCFC-22, has been phased out of new equipment in the industrialized world because it damages the earth’s ozone layer and contributes to global warming. There are strict limits on how much can be imported or sold in the United States by American manufacturers.

    But the gas is still produced in enormous volumes and sold cheaply in China, India and Mexico, among other places in the developing world, making it a profitable if unlikely commodity for international smugglers.

    So in 2009, Carlos Garcia, the Marcone vice president, generated big business for his company’s growing air-conditioning operation by selling smuggled foreign gas to repairmen at rock bottom prices in a promotion called Freaky Freon Fridays, drawing on a brand name that many use as a synonym for coolants.

    via NYTimes.com.

    Two great quotes:

    International efforts to curb the use of HCFC-22 are faltering for dozens of reasons, from loopholes in environmental treaties to the reluctance of manufacturers to step up development of more environmentally friendly machines.

    and,

    Many air-conditioning manufacturers have even figured out how to sidestep the 2010 ban on selling new machines containing HCFC-22, by offering unfilled air-conditioning compressors that service workers swap into existing units and then fill with the gas, creating refurbished machines that are as good as new.

    Ya, kinda like the war on drugs.  Big brother steps in and basically screws up the entire marketplace.  Businesses position themselves around the law and the only result is products are now more expensive to the consumer… slowing the whole economy.

    This notion the folks in the U.S. are rich and can afford the more expensive machine while folks in Mexico get to use HCFC-22 because they’re poor creates conditions ripe for a black market.  Same goes for the carbon credit swap in the Kyoto Treaty.  It’ll never work.

    None of these kinds of restrictions ever work.

  • Teachers’ Unions vs. Children

    When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.
    — Albert Shanker, former president of the United Federation of Teachers

    I wrote about this before, how the truth is that CTU, WEAC, and all other teacher’s unions have a fiduciary duty to the union members.  The union cannot do anything which would advance the interests of non-members (i.e. children) to the detriment of the members (i.e. teachers.)

    This is a very simple legal principle that most educated people easily understand.

    Of course there’s the greater philosophical discussion that should take place as to whether of not unions of government employees are to anyone’s benefit.

    The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.
    — F.D. Roosevelt, in 1937 to the National Federation of Federal Employees

    The idea being that when private sector employees collectively bargain they can overplay their hand only to their own detriment as well and to the detriment of their employer.  Another company will be the beneficiary of the higher wages (and cost of goods/services) of the first.  This is not true in government where there is no competition.

    Anyone seeking more and more from the public coffers should be considered with extreme skepticism.