Richard Rider's Open Salon Blog

Looks like I'm done with Open Salon

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 18:09:25 -0400

Because of the ongoing problems on this (apparently) dying website, I'm moving my blog to a new location. Actually it's the reactivation of a blog I used before.
http://RiderRants.blogspot.com/

Blogspot.com -- a.k.a. Blogger -- is quite good, and has improved measurably since last I was there.

While this "new" blog site is my new choice, the choice to leave Open Salon was not made without regret. There's much I've posted here that now I must painfully move, article by article, to my new website.

Open Salon is grinding to a halt -- like a gear box filled with sand. Sad but true.

BTW, Blogger/BlogSpot handles formatting better, has a spell checker and plays well with other websites via copy and paste. It also sends a daily email to my subscribers (easy to sign up) with my last 24 hour posts. Most important, it offers a handy back-up function -- something Open Salon has never mastered. Moreover, Open Salon's "search" function seems to be totally disabled.

I suspect Open Salon uses such old software that it's beyond repair. More important, I'm pretty sure it must lose money.

Time to move on. I'm sure all my liberal readers on this blog site will dearly miss me.

Dismal federal fiscal facts to consider

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 10:09:25 -0400

Today there is a long op-ed in the WS JOURNAL on the magnitude and cost of the current deficit spending, and the adverse consequences of the latest QE3 Federal Reserve "easy money" policy. Oddly enough, our 16 trillion dollar "national debt" is just a small component of our our overall federal debt problem.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303561504577497442109193610.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_h

OpiNION
September 16, 2012, 7:03 p.m. ET

The Magnitude of the Mess We're In

RIDER COMMENT (continued): You may indeed want to read the full article, but here are some salient excerpts -- questions and factoids to ponder (ignore random changes in fonts):

Did you know that annual spending by the federal government now exceeds the 2007 level by about $1 trillion? With a slow economy, revenues are little changed. The result is an unprecedented string of federal budget deficits, $1.4 trillion in 2009, $1.3 trillion in 2010, $1.3 trillion in 2011, and another $1.2 trillion on the way this year. The four-year increase in borrowing amounts to $55,000 per U.S. household.

The amount of debt is one thing. The burden of interest payments is another. The Treasury now has a preponderance of its debt issued in very short-term durations, to take advantage of low short-term interest rates. It must frequently refinance this debt which, when added to the current deficit, means Treasury must raise $4 trillion this year alone. So the debt burden will explode when interest rates go up.

The government has to get the money to finance its spending by taxing or borrowing. While it might be tempting to conclude that we can just tax upper-income people, did you know that the U.S. income tax system is already very progressive? The top 1% pay 37% of all income taxes and 50% pay none.

. . .

The Fed now pays 0.25% interest on reserves it holds. So the Fed is paying the banks almost $4 billion a year. If interest rates rise to 2%, and the Federal Reserve raises the rate it pays on reserves correspondingly, the payment rises to $30 billion a year. Would Congress appropriate that kind of money to give—not lend—to banks?

The Fed's policy of keeping interest rates so low for so long means that the real rate (after accounting for inflation) is negative, thereby cutting significantly the real income of those who have saved for retirement over their lifetime.

. . .

The issue is not merely how much we spend, but how wisely, how effectively. Did you know that the federal government had 46 separate job-training programs? Yet a 47th for green jobs was added, and the success rate was so poor that the Department of Labor inspector general said it should be shut down.

. . .

Did you know that funding for federal regulatory agencies and their employment levels are at all-time highs? In 2010, the number of Federal Register pages devoted to proposed new rules broke its previous all-time record for the second consecutive year. It's up by 25% compared to 2008. These regulations alone will impose large costs and create heightened uncertainty for business and especially small business.

. . .

President Obama's budget will raise the federal debt-to-GDP ratio to 80.4% in two years, about double its level at the end of 2008, and a larger percentage point increase than Greece from the end of 2008 to the beginning of this year.

Under the president's budget, for example, the debt expands rapidly to $18.8 trillion from $10.8 trillion in 10 years. The interest costs alone will reach $743 billion a year, more than we are currently spending on Social Security, Medicare or national defense, even under the benign assumption of no inflationary increase or adverse bond-market reaction. For every one percentage point increase in interest rates above this projection, interest costs rise by more than $100 billion, more than current spending on veterans' health and the National Institutes of Health combined.

. . .

Worse, the unfunded long-run liabilities of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid add tens of trillions of dollars to the debt, mostly due to rising real benefits per beneficiary. Before long, all the government will be able to do is finance the debt and pay pension and medical benefits. This spending will crowd out all other necessary government functions.

What does this spending and debt mean in the long run if it is not controlled? One result will be ever-higher income and payroll taxes on all taxpayers that will reach over 80% at the top and 70% for many middle-income working couples.

. . .

Ballotpedia.org: Great source on elections -- or not.

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 11:09:26 -0400

www.ballotpedia.org is an extremely useful source on elections -- especially propositions. It includes who are the backers and opponents, and who the big contributors are. But Ballotpedia "edit trolls" can alter or omit facts to suit their purposes. I just got involed in one such Ballotpedia situation on a California proposition.

It's very similar to Wikipedia in operation. Hence caution is advised.

I just corrected numerous errors in their post on California's Prop 30 (on this November's ballot) -- the "Jerry Brown" MASSIVE statewide increase in taxes (income and sales taxes).

http://www.ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/California_Proposition_30,_Sales_and_Income_Tax_Increase_(2012)

EVERY error I found understated the cost to taxpayers, or just outright omitted damaging information concerning the prop. Coincidental or intentional?

I found that EVERY calculation on the income tax understated the percentage increase in the tax -- by a LOT. Also it failed to include the 13.3% bracket on $1 million incomes in the summary -- falsely claiming that the top bracket was 12.3% above $500,000. And it failed to mention the retroactive nature of this tax -- a November vote that will impose the income tax back to 1 January, 2012.

I'm now signed up as an editor (too easy to do). In addition to correcting the "errors" and adding important omitted facts, I also added some annotated arguments against Prop 30 in the article. The opposition arguments selected seemed to me to be particularly weak (gosh, I wonder why?).

My stuff can in turn be edited by others. We shall see if my corrections are reversed/deleted. I'm not optimistic, but I am hopeful.

I do recommend you go to the link. The info on who is funding this prop makes clear that this is a labor union-sponsored effort. The seven figure contributions from unions speak for themselves.

Proof that I'm a racist (according to braying liberals)

Sun, 2 Sep 2012 13:09:33 -0400

Richard Boddie, a black libertarian friend of mine, sent me this article. It is written by Thomas Sowell, a black man I consider the most insightful commentator/philosopher in the country today (a title I've bestowed upon him for two decades).

The column is about the spate of recent unreported black race riots, as detailed in a book White Girl Bleed a Lot by former local SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE investigative reporter Colin Flaherty.

My post here proves one thing: I'm a racist. So says the Left.

Of course, the looney left so frequently plays the race card that this reflexive gambit has little impact any more -- outside of progressive groupthink circles.

The apologists for black-on-white mob violence think it's no big deal. It doesn't deserve reporting -- or at least reporting that details the race of the perps and the victims.

According to these left wing racists (yes, they ARE the racists, by any reasonable definition of the term), such reporting of black violence would only inflame racial animosity. Better to cover it up.

Of course, if there were a SINGLE incident where 30 WHITES set upon and severely beat a middle-aged black couple, the left wing (a.k.a. "mainstream") press would go into a tizzy -- drawing grand conclusions that white racism is rampant in America, yada, yada, yada.

Yet the fact that these brutal incidents DO occur over and over and over -- but are blacks groups beating mostly non-blacks -- somehow is no big deal. And anyone who says it is a big deal is -- you guessed it -- a racist.

====================

http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2012/07/17/are_race_riots_news

Townhall Columnists Thomas Sowell

Are Race Riots News?

Thomas Sowell

Jul 17, 2012

When I first saw a book with the title, "White Girl Bleed A Lot" by Colin Flaherty, I instantly knew what it was about, even though I had not seen the book reviewed anywhere, and knew nothing about the author.

That is because I had encountered that phrase before, while doing research for the four new chapters on intellectuals and race that I added to the revised edition of my own book, "Intellectuals and Society," published this year.

That phrase was spoken by a member of a mob of young blacks who attacked whites at random at a Fourth of July celebration in Milwaukee last year. What I was appalled to learn, in the course of my research, was that such race riots have occurred in other cities across the United States in recent years -- and that the national mainstream media usually ignore these riots.

Where the violence is too widespread and too widely known locally to be ignored, both the local media and public officials often describe what happened as unspecified "young people" attacking unspecified victims for unspecified reasons. But videos of the attacks often reveal both the racial nature of these attacks and the racial hostility expressed by the attackers.

Are race riots not news?

Ignoring racial violence only guarantees that it will get worse. The Chicago Tribune has publicly rationalized its filtering out of any racial identification of attackers and their victims, even though the media do not hesitate to mention race when decrying statistical disparities in arrest or imprisonment rates.

Such mob attacks have become so frequent in Chicago that officials promoting conventions there have recently complained to the mayor that the city is going to lose business if such widespread violence is not brought under control.

But neither these officials nor the mayor nor most of the media use that four-letter word, "race." It would not be politically correct or politically convenient in an election year.

Reading Colin Flaherty's book made painfully clear to me that the magnitude of this problem is even greater than I had discovered from my own research. He documents both the race riots and the media and political evasions in dozens of cities across America.

. . .

To read the full column, go to the link:
http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2012/07/17/are_race_riots_news

Minimum wage keeps teens out of work

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 15:08:19 -0400

It's a topic that bears repeated attention. Not because teenagers can't earn money for goodies, but because they go through the formative years without developing a work ethic. And employers are sensitive to this deficiency.

The longer the young (especially low income young) stay out of work (studying, playing, living off of others), the less likely that they are later employable. They become cannon fodder for the left.

---------------------

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=22174&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ncpadpd+%28Daily+Policy+Digest%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

Minimum Wage Myths that Keep Our Teens Out of Work

July 24, 2012

Recently, both the Economic Policy Institute and President Obama have supported a higher minimum wage while simultaneously lamenting the current lack of employment opportunities for young adults. The evidence suggests that accomplishing that second goal means giving up on the first, says Pamela Villarreal, a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, minimum wage workers are more likely to be teenagers, college students or secondary earners, rather than heads-of-households supporting families. About half are younger than age 25. It's this inexperienced group most affected by changes in the minimum wage whose employment has declined in recent years.

· In July 2007, the unemployment rate for 16- to 19-year-old workers was 15.3 percent; three years later, following a 41 percent increase in the federal minimum wage, the rate was 25.9 percent.

· In some urban areas, the unemployment rate for teenagers is exceptionally high.

· For instance, the teenage unemployment rate in Washington, D.C., last summer was 50 percent, the highest in the nation.

The recession has played a role in this teen employment crisis, but a wide body of economic research suggests minimum wages are also to blame. In their 2008 book Minimum Wages, economists David Neumark and William Wascher reviewed evidence on both sides of the minimum wage debate, and concluded that the "preponderance of evidence" pointed to job losses for young employees following a minimum wage increase.

Summer jobs are crucial for providing youth some real-world work experience, and minimum wage increases put them further out of reach. Reforming the education system and promoting characteristics that increase individual wages -- such as finishing high school and improving skills through college or trade/vocational schools -- would also do more to lift wages and the economy than an additional government wage mandate.

Source: Pamela Villarreal, "Minimum Wage Myths that Keep Our Teens Out of Work," The Hill, July 20, 2012.

For text:

http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/economy-a-budget/239251-minimum-wage-myths-that-keep-our-teens-out-of-work