Is Atlas shrugging?
Danny Lemieux on Jul 25 2011 at 9:40 am | Filed under: Uncategorized
I know of several people of considerable net worth who have already left the U.S. to settle elsewhere. I know others who have opted out of the workforce altogether to retire on what they have, knowing that their futures look grim. This morning, I listened to the founder and former CEO of The Home Depot, Bernie Marcus, explain that there is no way an enterprise such as The Home Depot could ever be founded in today’s regulatory climate. Around me, I see empty store fronts and shuttered businesses. The comments about the business climate from my contacts in California’s San Joaquin Valley are cringe inducing.
Then, via the blogs Small Dead Animals and Instapundit, I am directed this blog, linked below, describing one Alabama mine owner’s response to the current environmental, regulatory and business climate: read it carefully and read the comments.
http://www.davidmcelroy.org/?p=1586
Is Atlas shrugging?
What have all of you observed in your areas…do you have similar anecdotes to recount as well?
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14 Responses to “Is Atlas shrugging?”
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Danny, you ask a good question. Just what are the indicators that society’s best and brightest have decided to drop out and leave the statists to their squalid, and ultimately self-defeating, ways?
Where I live is a true outlier. Many of the people here are the ultimate parasites, folks who have been extraordinarily successful at living off of the market even as they countenance its destruction through the election of the likes of Obama, Boxer, Feinstein, Brown, Newsom and other crypto-Marxists.
As in biology, the host usually dies before the parasite, and the leeches here are at the top of the U.S. food chain. So, no, there are no outright indicators of Galtism here. But there are some interesting gnaw marks at the edges our little progressive paradise:
—We’re paying a 1/2-cent higher sales tax locally to support the leftist wet dream of a railroad that will whisk us from Central Marin to Cloverdale, a farm town 70 miles to the north. Cloverdale has an excellent Fosters Freeze (very much like Dairy Queen). At least that was the original wet dream. Unfortunately, the economy has lowered anticipated tax revenues by a couple of hundred million, so the plan now calls for shortening the track by 30 miles, eliminating the promised parallel bike lanes, eliminating several planned stations, scaling back frequency, yadda yadda.
The new northern terminus, Santa Rosa, is a burgeoning mini-metropolis that is metastasizing across the countryside. A pathetic passenger train pulling into downtown Santa Rosa will do nothing more than deliver a bunch of befuddled travelers to a slow, inefficient overcrowded local bus system. Me? I drive the 45 miles in less than an hour and arrive exactly at my destination without having to beg a bus driver to let me off where I want.
Did I mention that the people who are supposed to be planning this dream of a convenient transportation system are pulling down exorbitant salaries? But then, when your best and brightest are spending your money on something that’s good for you, shouldn’t they get paid a lot?
—My local sanitary district has announced that we need to speed up the replacement of aging sewer drains, which will require each household in my town to pony up an additional $600 per year. We were not allowed to vote on it. The head of the agency pulls down $300,000 per year to spend my money on projects that I don’t even have a say in. There are a lot of pissed off people—most of them Democrats—who are beginning to see what happens when parasites run amok. However, I’m sanguine about the depth of their revelation: Most of them will go to the polls next year and vote to re-elect Obama.
We are a remarkable juxtaposition to the Central Valley, which is being devastated by people like the ones I live among. The Galts there are leaving in droves, and the people who remain are more and more uneducated, lawless, and shiftless. The good, brave ones there cannot find work because of draconian court-imposed environmental restrictions.
When it comes time to chronicle the wanton destruction of the greatest agricultural breadbasket in history, Victor Davis Hanson’s Pajamas Media stream of narratives detailing it would, in a sane world, win high praise and honors. But that horror story is Over There, beyond the Bay Area’s protective eastern fringe of mountains, and happening to Those People, who aren’t Our People. Let Obama’s compassionate printing presses deal with them.
EPA received more than $7 billion in stimulus funds. Most of it was directed to 4,687 projects, many of which purchased signs.
An honest sign would have read: We’re Coming for You!
This is what happens when people think the Left is just another political party called by the name “Democrat party”, and think it is just peachy keen to completely loot and F up this country to make their bank accounts swell up.
Btw, the next time someone tries to tell me to my face that Republicans and Democrats are both the same and that’s why they vote Democrats in to make a power balance and they are Independents and blah blah, I’m really going to get that urge to take something hard and smash their face open with it. It’s people like that that are the useful idiot puppet tool honey sucking fools that make the Left work. If the blood of patriots is what makes America great, the idiocy of puppets is what makes the Left powerful. Then again, there’s too many of them to bother with. Ideally, taking out the leaders of the Left is better than taking out the organization, and taking both out is better than taking either one out, and all of that is better than taking one cannon fodder slave out of the circulation. There’s always more where they came from.
Btw, I would only get that urge because that would only hurt the person. What I would do without a hard object, might be more dangerous, and thus harder to resist.
People have been taught that evil is about this great big war that ends up killing millions of nameless and faceless men, women, and children. Those people don’t understand the first thing about evil. Yet.
SADIE: EPA received more than $7 billion in stimulus funds.
In case you’re interested.
http://www.epa.gov/recovery/
Charles Martel, this one is for you (of course, all are welcome to read and puke at their leisure). In a word, can any of them say the word: SKYPE?
Overall, according to documents uncovered by Judicial Watch in January 2011, Pelosi used the Air Force aircraft for a total of 43 trips, covering 90,155 miles, from January 1 through October 1, 2010. Judicial Watch, through FOIA, continues to pursue other records related to Pelosi’s use of Air Force aircraft.
http://www.judicialwatch.org/news/2011/jul/judicial-watch-uncovers-new-documents-detailing-pelosis-use-air-force-aircraft-her-fam
SADIE, Pelosi’s corruption is well known among people in the Bay Area who go outside the usual news sources. But she is guarded zealously within the region by an extermely compliant mass media. A game I play with my wife is to ask her, “Have you heard about. . . ? and then give a capsule summary of the latest outrage.
When the revelations about Pelosi’s contemptuous abuse of military flight privileges first came out, my wife winced when I brought it up. Even though she believed there was some bad news that somehow hadn’t gotten through to her, she simply shrugged it off. Like all good Democrats here, she didn’t want to be bothered thinking about the consequences of electing corrupt politically correct people to Congress.
The latest outrage that she has heard nothing about from the whore media here is Eric Holder’s gun running into Mexico.
A couple of interesting articles from AT, in case you haven’t visited there today…
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/07/is_your_ira_going_to_be_raided.html
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/07/among_the_tax-takers.html
Charles, my urge would be to print the ‘news’ on rolls of wallpaper and decorate, decorate, decorate.
suek, good links. I’ll add, any attempt to piddle with IRA accounts will result in a prompt and resounding cry for revolution.
How to save a TRILLION dollars or How to run an illegal brothel in DC. Can’t decide which header best fits the link. In either case, the whores are screwing the voters, making us pay for a service we never asked for and one they never intended to give us, either!
To put the numbers in perspective, the Congressional Budget Office estimated earlier this year that U.S. budget deficits would total $7 trillion over the coming decade.
But to reach $1 trillion in war costs, budget scorekeepers simply look at current funding for the wars and spread that out over 10 years, rather than projecting what is going to happen in the future.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/07/25/congress-warned-credit-downgrade-if-war-savings-counted-as-deficit-reduction/#ixzz1TALxXVgZ
[...] Danny Lemieux: [...]
Re: #11…
The only problem I have with the Cut, Cap and Balance proposal is that governments cheat. They don’t keep books like they require us ordinary folks to. If we kept books like they do, we’d end up in jail. For example, they have the term “off-budget” – that’s what Bush did with the Iraq war. I’m not exactly sure what “off-budget” means as far as their accounting goes, but everything you receive or spend is _on_ budget. If you have unplanned expenses (and the first year, this might count as an “off-budget” item, but not year 2, 3 etc), then there needs to be a reserve set aside for such occasions.
You can’t _really_ balance the books if you can cheat with your numbers. There needs to be set in concrete rules for Congressional spending, just like for the rest of us unequal animals.
I guess you could say that I like the idea, but I just don’t trust them.
I can see trying to unplug – the increasingly Orwellian nature of the Federal government is enough to drive anyone to distraction. The latest (and perpetual) thorn in my paw? President Obama’s petulant whine last night that he inherited a dismal economy, where as a country we threw away the Clinton surplus by (among other insignificant things like responding to the 9/11 attacks) PAYING FOR tax cuts for the rich.
It drives me nuts! I hear it again and again. I heard it from Michael Medved yesterday (he drives me nuts occasionally, but sometimes I find myself listening in the car). I can’t take it! Forgive the shouting, but:
IT’S NOT THEIR MONEY! A REDUCTION IN REVENUE IS NOT SPENDING!
Tax cuts are not spending unless you assume that the underlying GDP is from the beginning the property of the Federal government, and therefore our income comes only as a result of the largesse of our overlords in DC. I refuse to concede this fundamental point. If I choose to skip a couple of days of work a week, and then claim the resulting loss of income from my full-time baseline as a medical expense and try for the deduction, you can bet the IRS would NOT shrug and say “Well, those are just mental health days. He’s just paying for his time off… that’s legit medical spending!.” It is to laugh.
More than that:
THE TOTAL “BILL” FOR THE TAX CUTS IS LESS THAN THE FY2010 DEFICIT!!
According to WaPo, the total reduction in revenue resulting from Bush’s tax policy was less than $1,300,000,000,000 ($1.3 trillion) spread out over 10 years. Isn’t the latest estimate of our current year’s deficit $1,600,000,000,000 ($1.6 trillion) or so? What’s $300,000,000,000 ($300 billion) or so – especially when it’s the government’s money in the first place?
Finally:
IT’S NOT A BORROWING PROBLEM, IT’S A SPENDING PROBLEM!!!
As hapless as many Republicans are, at least some have tried to make the point that the threat to our credit rating is not based on the level of our self-imposed debt ceiling. The problem is the spending. We’re spending money that we don’t have, and it’s increasing the size of our debt. President Obama (un?)scrupulously avoided this fact in his call to “shared sacrifice” last night. The President’s casual dismissal of the significance of raising the debt ceiling (Reagan did it umpteen times, after all) was one more blatant attempt to shift the focus away from massive Federal spending to something he characterized as mere partisan bickering. Pathetic.
That’s it. I’ll return to more restrained fuming now.