Bookworm Room

Tweet In an earlier post, I asked several questions about economic issues that confuse me.  Robert Arvanitis wrote a comprehensive reply, but then couldn’t get the Word Press comment system to accept it.  Because it is so comprehensive and informative, I’m putting it up here as an independent post.  All that I ask of the [...]

10 Comments »

Tweet I have a few questions to ask, all of which involve economic trends. Why, if the economy is contracting and the labor market is flat-lined, has the stock market gone up? Will the stock market stay up (long-term and short-term predictions, please)? The IRS says that families will be paying $20,000 for health insurance.  [...]

9 Comments »

Tweet I wrote last week about the fact that the lapdog media is finally catching up with Obama’s claim that the problem with America’s economy is that ATMs are job destroyers, and that’s why our economy is a mess.  Many of you commented that, in your own industries, you’ve seen automation chip away at jobs [...]

14 Comments »

Tweet The newest Ivy Tower Leftist explanation for the economy’s disastrous jobless recovery riffs off of Obama’s remark a couple of years ago about the disastrous effect of ATMs.  You remember that, don’t you? President Obama explained to NBC News that the reason companies aren’t hiring is not because of his policies, it’s because the [...]

15 Comments »

I have a problem with that, especially having grown up with a workaholic father. The fact is, I am too exhausted to be constantly looking for a job or working more-than one job.” She let it be known that she really resented the implication that she should be expected to go out and work hard to earn her own financial support.

5 Comments »

Tweet Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize winning economist.  He’s also remarkably ignorant (or stupid or, maybe, both).  Only someone lacking in brains and understanding would think that the U.S. could get out of its debt problem, not by printing paper money, but by minting a platinum coin and then denominating it a “$1 trillion [...]

30 Comments »

Tweet When I was in junior high school, high school, and college, my American history classes always preached the same message:  Franklin Roosevelt saved America by “priming the pump.”  That is, he took money away from the rich, filtered it through the government, and then used the brain-power built into government to decide upon the [...]

12 Comments »

Tweet Today’s big story the new tax bill that Obama jetted off to Hawaii before signing, but that will soon (and inevitably) become the law of the land.  I don’t see any surprises.  I knew that we’d get hit hard and so we have. I gather that sequestration has now been averted, so that Obama [...]

13 Comments »

Tweet NRO has little daily polls.  Today’s asked if House Republicans are blowing in on the fiscal cliff.  The voting divide as of now is pretty close: I voted yes, but not because I was thinking about the substantive issues (taxes increases, spending cuts, etc.).  Instead, my “yes” vote resulted because I think the House [...]

1 Comment »

Tweet According to the much sneered at, and much feared, Mayan Apocalypse, tomorrow marks the end of the world.  I’m inclined to believe this is true.  I don’t, however, expect the earth to explode into a giant ball of cosmic dust or some plague rivaling the Black Death.  What I do see, however, is change [...]

7 Comments »

Tweet [My friend, and too infrequent guest-blogger, Lulu puts our economic problems in terms the women who voted for Obama might be able to understand.] Recently I was talking to some bright, educated women about how they wanted to help their children learn the value of money and appreciate receiving things, and to understand that [...]

12 Comments »

Tweet When conservative writers and thinkers come to San Francisco, it’s a good bet that they’re doing so under the aegis of Sally Pipes’ Pacific Research Institute (PRI), a conservative think tank rather surprisingly located in San Francisco.  Sally’s specialty is free-market medical care, but PRI is concerned generally with free markets.  Thanks to PRI, [...]

No Comments »

Tweet Several Watcher’s Council members have tackled the question that’s on every political junkie’s mind:  The Fiscal Cliff — Let it Happen or Grand Bargain?

1 Comment »

Tweet “Who’s Thomas Sowell?” my daughter asked. “He’s a genius,” I replied. “Why?” “Because he has the rare gift of simplifying very complex ideas without dumbing them down.” See for yourself: After listening to Sowell, my blog’s motto seems appropriate:  “Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.” [...]

7 Comments »

Tweet Al Gore got a lot of mileage out of likening the slow accretion of anthropogenic climate change to a frog in cold water that was gradually being heated to boiling point. He contended that, just as the frogs were lulled by the gradual heat to be the point at which they’d fail to react [...]

4 Comments »

Tweet On Monday, I noted that ObamaCare regulations requiring employers to provide full (really full) insurance coverage to all employees may make running restaurants, which have a famously low profit margin, so prohibitively expensive that many will go out of business. It turns out that we needn’t fear this eventuality, because we’re about to see [...]

10 Comments »

Tweet I’m not boasting when I say that I move in very rarefied circles.  It’s a fact that became glaringly obvious to me today when I started reaching out to legal colleagues via LinkedIn.  I’m launching a new business enterprise, and those connections will be useful. For those unfamiliar with it, LinkedIn is the professional [...]

48 Comments »

Quite clearly, our own environmentally sensitive natives believed that all one needed to do was to build bricks, mortar and steel into modern-looking structures, pick an environmentally friendly “technology” with a cool sounding name and, voila! Magic benefits would come out of thin air – endless BTUs of cheap, pollution-free, guilt-free, Gaia-approved energy that defied the laws of physics, engineering and economics.

8 Comments »

Tweet

No Comments »

Tweet Many of Obama’s most educated supporters believe in him because they believe in Keynesian economics.  Central to that belief is the theory that government itself can be an economic engine.  If people aren’t working, have them work for the government or at least have the government fund their ostensibly “private sector” jobs.  This theory [...]

7 Comments »

Tweet Another American Crossroads ad in a James Bond style, this one attacking Obama’s inflationary policies: It’s clever, funny, and understandable, so please consider sharing it with others.  The election clock is ticking, and it’s up to citizens to counter the media’s all-out push for Obama.

1 Comment »

Tweet Trust Thomas Sowell to explain why government-forced redistribution always fails, and to do so in language so clear even a child educated in public schools can understand: You can confiscate only the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth — and that future wealth is less likely to be [...]

6 Comments »

Tweet The Romney campaign looked at he numbers.  Will the Obama Media be able to hide this from the American people? 23,136,000: The Number Of Americans Who Are Unemployed, Underemployed, Or Have Stopped Looking For Work. (Bureau Of Labor Statistics, Accessed 9/7/12) 12,544,000: The Number Of Unemployed Workers. (Bureau Of Labor Statistics, Accessed 9/7/12) 8,031,000: [...]

2 Comments »

Tweet Brilliant.  You have to share this one far and wide: Hat tip: Radio Patriot

6 Comments »

Tweet The first video has Andrew Klavan explaining Obamanomics.  The second video shows Obamanomics in action.  The first video is funny and depressing; the second video startled a nervous giggle out of me, but mostly made me deeply fearful for our future: UPDATE: I need to add another video to this mix, one that shows [...]

4 Comments »