The ‘go green’ ideology is a good case study of successful propaganda .. but that is for another time. Right now, its effect is becoming evident. Nevada power company has a rate increase on the table in part to pay for the mandated percentage of its power that must come from ‘green’ sources. On the other side of the planet comes the question Will a new real estate tax save us from solar insanity?

The subsidized photovoltaic industry has exploded in the mostly cloudy Czech Republic. Within a year, the amount of electricity produced by solar panels has increased by a whole order of magnitude. As a result, the leading power utility, ČEZ, estimates that it may have to raise the price of electricity by a whopping 20 or 30 percent starting from January 2011.

Since the agreements have been made and the monies committed, the question at this time is how to ameliorate the damages. One idea is taxes.

Whatever happened to the market?

Many complain that jobs are being taken from U.S. citizens by cheap foreign illegal labor. It is a political hot potato and a new report adds fuel to the fire. Bruce Krasting says it’s Social Security Trust Fund’s Labor Day Bombshell.

SS has been collecting money from illegal aliens for years. They will keep the money they have collected and they will not pay out any benefits (except fraud) in the future. So this money is “free”. I have often wondered how big the numbers on this are. Now we know. The numbers are enormous. Without the Free Money coming in from illegal aliens SS would look much different than we “think” it does.

The illegal alien workforce may be contributing as much as 13.5% of the Social Security taxes. Most reporting about the status of Social Security have assumed that all who contribute will receive benefits. When there is such a large amount that will not, as of now, have to be paid to its contributors, it means that those reports have significantly overstated the liabilities versus the benefits.

In some respects this is nice because it is ‘free’ money for the government program. Krasting points out that this sort of thing is also political hay that appears to be used to support questionable positions.

The Administration will use the Goss revelation to prove to the American people that illegal workers have made a major contribution to the US economy via the taxes they paid to SS. This will be done to blunt the growing tide of ire among those who actually live here.

But what’s wrong with ‘free’ money? There is, of course, the dishonesty involved in taxing some folks with a false promise, even if they made false representation about who they were. Much more important though, is in how Social Security security is viewed and considered.

I will say that this is a sea change event for how we look at SS. All prior analysis and all future expectations must now be revisited. I assure you that the results after excluding the illegal taxes will be will prove to be a major blow to the solvency of the Fund.

Things just aren’t as simple as they seem, sometimes. This source of Social Security funds is also not the only questionable source. There is also the interest rates on the Treasury bonds behind the funds that is worth some consideration. When you get to mangling the books, all sorts of interesting things can happen.

Ted Nugent says It is us. The people are looking for the easy way out whether that way is to let the government do it or to just vote for whatever sounds good. The results repeat history and they are not good. Those who do question the authorities have a tough row to hoe.

I have been damned as being a radical extremist my entire adult life for simply standing up and relentlessly promoting and celebrating self-evident truth, logic and common sense. The devil brigade acting upon the Saul Alinsky deception playbook has made its mark by lying, cheating and attacking with the very hate that it accuses everybody else of harboring. With an overall complicit media to bullhorn the brigade’s agenda, a nation of sheep has taken the pill and swallowed it whole.

Those who don’t think that there is a difference, those who are looking for personal benefit from government, those who don’t seem to mind a lack of integrity – it is us – they are the ones who will wonder what happened (and continue to try to blame it on someone else).

With attack ads that cite Angle as “dangerous,” there is another message: that of fear of change. It is like an unintentional double entendre where the current administration’s “hope and change” becomes something to fear if real change is suggested. Angle is suggesting real change and Reid’s message is an appeal to the status guo.

Marc Thiessen describes Harry Reid’s strategy, and Sharron Angle’s path to victory:

Reid needs to drive as many voters as he can away from Angle and toward these alternatives. He plans to do this in two ways. The fake Tea Party attacks are designed to siphon off as many conservative and libertarian votes as possible — and in an election that could be decided by a few hundred votes, even a small number of defections on the right could be devastating. Meanwhile, Reid intends to push moderates into the “none of the above” category by portraying Angle as “a full-time resident of the paranoid alternate universe.”

It is not likely that this resistance to change illustrated by fear mongering attack ads is an effective public strategy. That makes it a reasonable approach for Reid. Thiessen says Angle is biding her time, developing her plan, and doing what she can to minimize gaffs that can be used as ammunition against her. That was a month ago. Robert Cost says Sharron Angle Can Smile today and describes the response.

To fight back against the growing tide of criticism, Angle has made a $330,000 television buy this week to air her first series of positive ads, beginning with the spot below. In the ad, Angle talks about “liberty and freedom” and about the problem of the debt and deficits. “That’s why you and I have an opportunity right now to change the direction of our country,” she says, before ending the spot with a grin. Unlike her first ad, with its network-drama gloom music, the new ad does not even mention Reid.

Reid has now been caught in two major deceptive campaign tactics, the web site theft and the fake Tea Party attacks. He has gone negative with ads to leverage fear of change to castigate his opponent. Angle provides voters an alternative to this method of doing business. There has been a lot of words that say they want it. The question is whether the votes will support this desire.

The latest ‘car out of control’ scare has resulted in yet another investigation that can’t support the allegations. From the looks of it, the ‘unintended acceleration cases that blamed Toyota occurred without any brakes applied and the throttle fully depressed – i.e. driver error.

So too, Broadband Performance Maybe Not So Bad After All reports Dr. Dobb’s journal.

The FCC provides the example in its effort to take over control of the I’net. It had reported that US broadband connections were half or less of advertised speed. A recently released MIT Internet Traffic Analysis Study (MITAS) suggests otherwise.

In each case that the study examined, the underestimation of the access networks’ speed had a different cause. The study that the FCC relied upon, for instance, analyzed data for broadband subscribers with different “tiers of service”… they assumed that the subscription tier could be inferred from the maximum measured rate. The MITAS researchers show that, in fact, the subscribers in lower tiers sometimes ended up getting higher data rates than they had paid for. In the study cited by the FCC, exceptionally good service for a low tier may have been misclassified as exceptionally bad service for a higher tier.

As with climate research, there is a pattern of bias that seems to fit ideologically oriented goals. Skepticism is warranted.

Why does government keep getting bigger and more obnoxious? Make a simple law, hire a bureaucrat to implement, and that invests the bureaucrat with the need to keep busy so he looks for how to apply his hammer to anything he thinks might be a nail. Culberson: FCC Can’t Regulate the Internet describes one of the more egregious examples currently in play.

The FCC cannot regulate the Internet without clear and unambiguous statutory authority from Congress, which it does not have. But instead of coming to Congress and asking for it, the FCC lawyered up and attempted to bend the rules to its liking.

Note the use of lawfare to seek goals rather than appropriate political process.

Rep. Culberson notes that there does need to be someone like the FCC to go after cybercrime. What is not described is that the FCC efforts are towards social enforcements such as broadband access that have nothing to do with child pornography, fraud, or libel. That is another indicator of misplaced priorities. It is towards goals that are for redistribution of assets rather than a protection of assets. That is another trend that seems to correlate well with the living, breathing, and growing bureaucracy and government.

The pressure to obtain income to match state government spending has legislatures demonstrating significant creativity. That money has to come from the masses but how it is collected needs to avoid notice if at all possible. Sometimes people do notice. Nevada recently passed a law to raise funds that has generated some notice. Fact Checker: Registration tax triples on 9-year-old vehicles describes a case.

The increase in sales tax and the tax on vehicle registration are both regressive taxes. Those who spend most of their money on supplies and have older vehicles are going to feel the taxes more than those who spend their money on services and have newer vehicles.

Incremental sales tax increases often fly under the radar as they will be hidden in the noise of nominal price fluctuations. The key for legislatures is the slow and sure approach. Once you get people used to paying the tax and get the infrastructure set up to collect it, you can make occasional small increases over the years that are sized to avoid notice. Since it such a broad tax, a small increase can generate significant revenue. The impact of that tax on economic activity is difficult to pin down so arguments against it are difficult.

The vehicle registration tax could also be incremental but the legislature may have overstepped on this one. As in the RGJ column, owners of older vehicles may have seen a threefold increase in their annual fee. That tends to cause one to sit up and take notice. “Officials hoped that it would bring in expected revenue of $94 million. … as of the end of May, the DMV had transferred about $46 million this fiscal year to the General Fund.”

These taxes plus another few taxes and fees, especially on small businesses, were “expected to raise $781 million in taxes to help fill the state’s $3 billion revenue shortfall.” That’s only a quarter of the needed money which means a significant squeeze. What is the legislature to do to close the gap? Their constituents demand services yet the money to provide those services is not there. And this is only for the state. Local and federal levels face a similar squeeze. The natural tendency is to just raise taxes. This is like a novice entrepreneur deciding to raise the price of his merchandise to increase income. That natural tendency has been shown to be questionable. Raise the price, or the tax rate, above a certain point and it will reduce sales to the point that overall income decreases. Make it too low and and the profit margin reduces to an inefficient level. The challenge both for the entrepreneur and for the state is to set their prices or tax rates to just the right place so as to maximize healthy activity and optimize revenue. That is not as easy a task as it sounds.

It is when you can’t tell what they are going to do that they become dangerous. The July 4 camping weekend provided a case in point.

In the camping business, July 4 is the busiest day of the year. This year, on July 3, I got a call from one of my managers saying that the County health department had tested 20 ground squirrels in the area and found one with the plague. … in the past, we have usually been required to post warnings in the area giving safety tips to campers to avoid these animals, what to do if one is bitten, etc. At the same time, we then begin a program of poisoning all the lairs we can find. … This time the health department marched out and closed the campground on July 4 weekend, kicking out campers from all 70 sites.
…
It is hard to imagine that, given the whole year to test, they just suddenly happened to find a problem at one of the busiest sites in the LA area on the busiest weekend of the year, particularly since they simultaneously changed their mitigation approach from notification to closure.

Well, it made a splash. A lot of families had to change their plans for a vacation weekend and a management company had a lot of unexpected work to do. But that is what happens when there is a lack of accountability and pressures to communicate. Like threating to reduce fire and police services in a budget crunch, propaganda comes in many forms.

“Armed with knowledge about California’s three public-union heavyweights, one can start to understand how the state found itself in its nightmarish fiscal situation.” Certainly, employees desire better wages and benefits and that is a proper market pressure. The problem comes in when the distance between employer and employee becomes larger and more obtuse as then the responsibility for decisions becomes less clear. Create a situation where both only meet via representatives and you have a recipe for disaster. Unions and elected representatives make the case. Steven Malanga describes how public-sector unions broke California with a history lesson.

The rise of the white-collar CTA provides a good example of a fundamental political shift that took place everywhere in the labor movement. In the aftermath of World War II, at the height of its influence, organized labor was dominated by private workers; as a result, union members were often culturally conservative and economically pro-growth. But as government workers have come to dominate the movement, it has moved left. By the mid-nineties, the CTA was supporting causes well beyond its purview as a collective bargaining agent for teachers.

The lesson is one of feedback and checks and balances in governance. Diligence of the citizenry is one component that has been lacking else the unions would not have their political clout. The ‘running out of other people’s money’ is another but one that tells you all others have failed. The challenge for California and many other governments from municipal to national is to take heed of the need to make corrections before they repeat what has happened to the Soviet Union and other socialist oriented states.

You’d think environmental protection would be all about reducing pollutants. Mark Tapscott describes how EPA rejects Texas program that reduced emissions, increased productivity.

The federal government must regulate sensibly and consider the practical implications of its actions. The inflexibility of EPA’s regulatory mandate will cost Texas thousands of jobs,” Olson said.

It is innovation in the states in areas like this where the federalist ideas in U.S. governance can contribute most. It is examples like this, though, that show the balance shifting towards a more centralized governance. Keeping a proper balance may not be easy but it may be necessary.

Powerline cites Shannen Coffin regarding defending the federal partial-birth abortion act in court. At issue is a report by a “select panel” of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), a supposedly nonpartisan physicians’ organization. The report was found to be highly persuasive by SCOTUS in striking down Nebraska’s partial-birth abortion ban.

The problem is that the conclusions of the report weren’t quite as presented. If the allegations are true,

The federal courts were victimized by a gross deception and a perversion of both the scientific process and the judicial process

How familiar this is. It is one thing to be a bit biased but another entirely to fudge the data. In many issues, though, fudging the data seems to be the case. Partial birth abortion in this case, human caused climate change in another. The phenomena needs to be understood and exposed for better political decision making.

You must not believe the witness of your own lying eyes, it seems. AlterNet seems to think ACORN Totally Vindicated of All Wrongdoing — What Was That ‘Scandal’ All About?. The commentary is more of a study in self deception than it is of reality.

The GAO report was a review of grants by nine federal agencies and it found no problems with those grants. That builds a straw man to distract the attention away from the scandals that caused ACORN much embarrassment. That is followed by developing the appeal to authority by describing GAO as independent and nonpartisan and a watchdog. Then the expose’ was judged to be edited and misleading and deceptive and a part of a Republican partisan campaign, conservative activists, “lunatic right wing,” and the “Faux Noose” propaganda arm (some in the comments).

Of course, the frequent mention of the author’s book is probably just coincidental.

There are parallels in the manner by which the climate research questions are being swept under the rug. It is something to note. Who do you want to believe? Tentative or preliminary reports with a carefully crafted limited scope or your own lying eyes? From this commentary, it seems that some don’t think their own witness is worth much.

The Washington Times columnists are taking note of what the response to the Gulf Oil Spill tells us about political ideologies. The expression is, to some at least, a concern and a warning.

Nugent: “This does not mean America should not look for other forms of energy to quench our thirst for power. However, we must not rush to embrace alternative forms of energy without first doing due diligence.”

Decker: “The fate of the Deepwater Horizon rig was the consequence of actions taken in pursuit of BP’s corporate strategy to become known as the environmentally-friendly energy company. This agenda was drilled into public consciousness by a slick marketing campaign which rebranded BP to stand for “Beyond Petroleum.””

Murdock: “11 other countries and the United Nations also had offered skimmer boats and other assets and experts to prevent the oil from destroying dolphins, crabs, oysters and this disaster’s other defenseless victims. … Alas, they were turned away.”

It does not appear that the ecological damage is the primary concern, nor has it been. It has just been the rationale for its appeal. When push comes to shove though, it is the unions, the corporation bashing, energy fantasies, and other such things that seem to take priority.

The headlines say the President plans to make sure that BP pays for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Note the focus. It is on punishing the corporation that suffered a major industrial catastrophe and not on trying to help BP fix and alleviate problems and prevent or minimize potential damage.

This seems to be a modern approach to any difficulty. Attack someone rather than the difficulty. The effectiveness of this approach is something to consider.

Young America’s Foundation did a survey of commencement speakers. Hillary May reports at the Washington Times.

The invitations to administration figures is “only the tip of the iceberg,” according to the survey. “This year’s research found that a myriad of speakers were not only White House officials, but also liberal ideologues, newsmakers, authors and entrenched Washington insiders, while conservative best-selling authors, business leaders and free-market Nobel laureates were once again absent from our list.”

The bias measured is in line with other indications. What is interesting is the rationales given. It appears that the universities surveyed either deny that they have any proclivities for commencement speakers of a particular ideological slant or that they use “the speaker’s accomplishments” as the criterion for selection.

“All of the honorees are chosen because they are people who have achieved a great deal in their lives and can stand as examples for men and women graduating that day,” Mr. Beckman said. “The politics of the honorary recipients are basically unknown to us and that is not why they are being honored.”

Of course, this begs the question about what achievements are being used as a reference. That is why the “Young America’s Foundation is encouraging students to carry voice recorders and video cameras to their ceremonies to capture speakers attempting to use their speeches as a way to “indoctrinate” young audiences.” Exposure is one of the better ways to actually see the standards in action and to educate those who send students to these universities about just what education they are buying.

Daniel Greenfield asks “What is Behind Liberalism’s Obesity Obsession?” and ponders the idea that it is about control.

So much of the current Nanny Statism has been focused on the “threat” of obesity. A movement that will only get worse with its prime movers having consolidated control over national health care with ObamaCare. Now that government can claim that everyone’s individual health is no longer just an issue for them, but a public cost, they have a mandate to exercise complete control over what everyone eats.
…
a War on Obesity justifies all sorts of micromanagement of the agricultural and food production sectors. Blaming America’s food production sector for a public health problem allows them to play the same game with every company from Kraft to Heinz to General Mills to PepsiCo that they previously have with tobacco companies. To understand why the left would want to do this, you only need to look at the USSR in the past or Venezuela in the present, both of which imposed price controls over food products and tight control over farming.

He also touches on an idea that is quite evident in the Global Warming fracas.

a staple of the left’s exercise of power is to “shame” the public for their abuse of resources. This is common in every Communist countries that run on the illusion of collective economies and constantly berate some group for taking more than “their fair share”.
…
The left has always thrived on this kind of “Divide and Conquer”, on convincing people to resent and inform on each other, so that they view the government as their protector and their neighbor as their enemy. Furthermore by constantly making people feel insecure and unworthy, they are likely to not only blame their neighbors, but themselves for the system not working the way it should.

A deficiency, a flaw, or something that appears to be a problem is named and described as something for government to fix. That then generates legislative action to fix it and that action is usually towards imposing controls. Those controls may have only superficial relation to the stimulating problem. This keeps up in the pursuit of perfection and the controls ‘expose’ more problems that need more controls that create more problems.

Traffic, finance, education, health, .., it is a target rich environment for those seeking things government should fix.

In Texas, it’s the school curriculum and in Arizona it is a matter of making federal law local. Both have broad popular support but both have stimulated outrage and some very interesting headlines and accusations. On the Texas controversy, William Muchison asks How Dare You Teach Conservatism!

When did I know the board had done essentially the right thing? The moment I picked up the Dallas Morning News and drank in the musings of a columnist who was, well, let’s just say beside herself.

The degree of outrage to the actions of both Arizona and Texas seems out of perspective and that is an indicator that something deep has been tickled. The Arizona immigration law was condemned before it was even read, labeled “racist,” and even the Mexican President condemned it despite his own country’s immigration law being much more severe and much more harshly enforced.

This is the manner of the debate. There is a difference. Can you see it?

The Volokh Conspiracy has a pair of posts that provide good examples and illustrations of methods of argument and debate. The first is of the “the other side is stupid” type but it cites ignorance rather than stupidity and defines several specific items. The second is a “no I’m not” rebuttal that uses ‘everybody does it’ logic creating obfuscation and straw men in the process, not to mention the ad hominmen that shows especially in the comments.

Todd Zywicki starts off with a report on a survey that finds that The Further Left You Are the Less You Know About Economics:. The survey questions were basic economic implications of supply restriction processes.

Note that the questions here are not whether the benefits of these policies might outweigh the costs, but the basic economic effects of these policies.

Those identifying as “libertarian” and “very conservative” were the most knowledgeable about basic economics. Those identifying as “Progressive” and “Liberal” were the worst.

It would be hard to find a set of propositions that would meet with such a degree of consensus among economists to rival these propositions–which boils down to supply restrictions raise prices and price controls create shortages. These are issues on which economic theory is exceedingly clear, well-confirmed over decades of empirical support, and with a degree of unarguable consensus among trained scholars in the field.

Ilya Somin picks up the point with claims about Ideology and Economic Ignorance.

These findings are very valuable. But they are subject to several caveats.
…
I expect that many more conservatives than liberals deny that the War on Drugs creates black markets and violence, believe that immigration is a zero-sum competition for jobs between immigrants and natives, and deny that laws banning prostitution and gambling have various negative economic side-effects
..
Second, the authors don’t really address the issue of whether being on the left causes people to be more ignorant about the economics of the issues addressed by the Zogby poll or vice versa.

The issue raised by Zywicki has nothing to do with one’s perceptions of one ideologic group or another and did not delve into cause but only correlation. The fact that the response does not take up on an observation but rather creates an extrapolation and then engages in facilitating a constructed equality of both ideologic follower groups is what should be noted here. The implication of these tactics is that Somin’s response is a rationalization or a defensive denial. Compare and contrast. Carefully. That means examining what is provided and not constructing something that was not in order to make one’s point.

A boycott is when individuals each make a common decision regarding their own behavior. An embargo is when a government makes such a decision for its citizens. Bruce Walker notes this difference in describing San Francisco’s Unconstitutional Arizona ‘Boycott’.

If state and city governments begin to exercise an extra-constitutional power to obstruct interstate commerce by imposing political filters, then there is no logical ending point to a feud between politicians from one part of the country and those in another part of the country. State and local governments throughout the nation have duties to each other. Apolitical and open trade is one of those duties.
…
The danger of substituting brute state force for persuaded consumer opinion is that there is no end to the cycle of action and reaction — and no resolution to any of the underlying problems.

In other words when some California community board gets together to parade its indignation about some political views it does not like, it us putting on a face that is symbolism without substance. Rather than trust those it represents to take the proper action, it tells them what action should be taken. These are the sort of folks who talk about Limbaugh’s “mind numbed robots.”

The Washington Times carries two commentaries from the front. Robert Knight describes how the Court puts Boy Scouts in a moral quandary and Dave Berg take on the Salute to atheism on National Day of Prayer

The Scouts are caught between a rock and a hard place. Either they drop their moral standard and put boys and their own legal survival at risk, or they face endless harassment designed to bankrupt them.

Then there’s the ruling that the National Day of Prayer is a violation of the First Amendment.

Yet the numerically insignificant FFRF (14,000 members) has effectively put Christianity and all other religions in America on the defensive.

Berg’s advice?

The atheist group is on a “holy” mission, which I respect. I understand what faith the size of a mustard seed can do. This isn’t about turning the other cheek. Jesus never said lie down and play dead when the other side gets out of hand. Ask the money changers.

Meanwhile there are the American flag wearing school kids who shouldn’t tease others on a foreign national holiday; a terrorist bombing attempt by a man with a close fit to groups and a profile whose name shall not be uttered; the Pope’s sex scandal, the Greeks and other “where’s the cash… gimme my (your) money” riots, and on.

It almost seems as if some like the fight just so they have something to do.