The kicker? The kids all have flat screen TVs at home and other luxuries that their hardworking teacher can’t afford. But they are “poor” because they have been told that, because they receive reduced school lunches, and because they fall into the poverty level according to the government’s poverty calculators (which measure income, not what that income is spent on). The message to these kids is that because they are poor they can’t do certain things, even buy a notebook which can cost less than $1. Is this really how we’re raising the next generation?

I just heard an interview the other day with the Secretary of Health and Human Services, who is looking into raising the level which is considered living in poverty by the federal government. Sure, there are poor people in the United States. I know a few of them, and they don’t have flat screen TVs, but they have houses, a car, clothes. They live a life that the actual poor in other countries could only dream of, and they probably consider themselves too poor to spare $1 in change to save a life in Africa. When you tell people they’re poor, they begin to really think so.

I can’t say how many times I’ve been caught in the line behind a woman in the grocery store with nicer clothes than me, perfect manicure and hair, who is using WIC (Women, Infant, Children) certificates to buy all her food. I’m sure there are people who need and use this program, but the ones who use it and don’t need it are not few and far between from what I’ve seen. I’ve even been greeted with surprise by a cashier who asks if I’ll be using WIC to pay for my purchases– I guess I’m the age where all young women pay with WIC. Don’t even get me started on the phenomenon of people who sell their food stamps.

It is sad when we as a society place more value on outside appearance of wealth (flat screen TV, manicured nails, nice clothes) than we do on food, benefiting society rather than it personally benefiting you, honesty, authenticity, and education. This problem is basically a microcosm of what is wrong with our entire American society.

The AP writes:

” The thrifty measures Obama ordered for federal agencies are the equivalent of asking a family that spends $60,000 in a year to save $6.

Obama made his push for frugality the subject of his first Cabinet meeting, ensuring it would command the capital’s attention. It also set off outbursts of mental math and scribbled calculations as political friend and foe tried to figure out its impact.

The bottom line: Not much.

The president gave his Cabinet 90 days to find $100 million in savings to achieve over time.

For all the trumpeting, the effort raised questions about why Obama set the bar so low, considering that $100 million amounts to:

_Less than one-quarter of the budget increase that Congress awarded to itself.

_4 percent of the military aid the United States sends to Israel.

_Less than half the cost of one F-22 fighter plane.

_7 percent of the federal subsidy for the money-losing Amtrak passenger rail system.

_1/10,000th of the government’s operating budgets for Cabinet agencies, excluding the Iraq and Afghan wars and the stimulus bill.”

Of course, there are those who think that Obama’s doing all he can to restrain the budget.

Courtesy of The White Rabbit Cult.

A mother of eight lives in a £2.6 million rented townhouse, paid for by the local council, because her huge family didn’t fit in council housing. She blames society for any problems she’s had in the past; society has “failed her.”

Teachers are forbidden in hundreds of UK schools from using red ink, because doing so is “confrontational.” Being told you’re wrong in green or yellow is apparently more soothing.

Happy Boxing Day!

Yes, this is probably the only government agency for which you’ll get a real person answering your call, tonight at 1-877-HINORAD. You can also email noradtrackingsanta@gmail.com.

I just called and the operator said Santa was just entering Maui, which means he may have just visited the Obama children.

“Santa Claus may be able to fly around the world in a sleigh, but even he can’t cross North American airspace without NORAD knowing about it.”

“”If we didn’t do it, truly I don’t know who else would track Santa,” said Maj. Stacia Reddish.”

Why not make it means-tested?

Why should rich people get Social Security? When I ask people this, they reply that “We all pay into it, we should all get something out of it.” But we all pay taxes and we don’t all get food stamps, day care subsidies, Medicare or government kickbacks like some people do, do we? Why should we all get Social Security even if we all pay into it?

Any time I hear an argument for keeping Social Security, it involves helping poor elderly people, not sending checks to Robert Redford or Clint Eastwood.

So why should a rich person get Social Security? They’re rich. They don’t need it. Money is going from poor kids fresh out of college– and even teenagers working hard to buy their first car, or save up for college– straight into the bank accounts of Warren Buffett and Carl Icahn and that rich kid you knew in high school’s grandma down the road. In many cases, it’s going from a middle-class grandchild straight to their affluent grandma in Florida.

If you don’t think Social Security is in trouble, take a look at one of the Democrats’ plans for fixing it that failed in 2004-2005, because people don’t want to face up to reality:

I believed Social Security wasn’t in much trouble at all–just needed a few “tweaks”–until I looked at the tweaks the Two Peters were proposing. In addition to the benefit cuts outline above, Diamond and Orszag have the current 12.4 percent Social Security payroll tax rising to 15.4 percent in 2078 and continuing to rise “slowly over time thereafter.” Even if the Medicare tax is kept at its current 2.9 percent (a seeming impossibility) that means total FICA payroll taxes in excess of 18%. You want to try to finance universal health care on top of that? I don’t.

If Democrats want to know what a benefit cut that really zings the rich looks like, they should go to Australia, where (last time I checked) the top quarter of recipients gets no benefits at all. Zero. The bottom half gets full benefits. The people in between get in between. Now that’s a means test! Not coincidentally, after means-testing was introduced in the 1980s, Australia’s pension system cost a little more than half what ours costs, in terms of GDP.

Some people are dead-set against this idea. For instance, according to the “misguided demagogue” Saul Friedman, Max Skidmore wrote in his book, Securing America’s Future:

“Means-testing Social Security would change its nature and destroy the system. Universal coverage, regardless of need, is one of Social Security’s strong points. Millionaires do receive benefits, but they also pay into the system. Their benefits represent a smaller return on what they pay than do the benefits of lower-paid workers… Building in ‘need’ as a criterion to qualify for benefits would require the majority of Americans to contribute for a lifetime to a program from which they could draw no benefits.”

In other words, they don’t get back nearly what they paid in, but if we didn’t send checks to these millionaires, the system would be destroyed? How does that make any sense?

They’re already getting a bum deal by not getting back what they paid into the system, and they already pay far more in taxes above and beyond that for things they’ll never use– Medicare, state taxes for welfare and public transit and all those things that rich people have no need for. Is Medicare destroyed by not giving it to everyone? Is public transit destroyed because more people pay for it than use it? I don’t follow this argument.

Skidmore also wants to lift the income cutoff for paying Social Security taxes and dedicate death taxes to the Social Security fund… so he wants rich people to still get their “benefits,” but pay millions more dollars more into the system. How is that more fair to rich people than just telling them they won’t get benefits at all?

Joe the Plumber is the perfect messenger: he’s not a Wall Street banker or a lawyer or even a doctor. His name is actually Joe, and he provides an important, if un-glamourous, service: plumbing. No one becomes a plumber because they want to be a millionaire, although I’m sure plumbing, like garbage collecting, can help someone earn a good living because there’s less competition in people who want to take on the job.

Those who are criticizing Joe as a wealthy man who needs to hand over his dough to other Americans (as is the case with the New York Times’ Caucus comment section seem to think Joe is making his work visits in limos and relaxing, sipping champagne while he’s fixing people’s plumbing. The man says he wants to save for his son’s college education and works 10 to 12 hours a day to do so (and by the time his son gets to college, the price tag for tuition will be so over-inflated that he might in fact need that entire $250,000 a year to pay it).

Joe the Plumber (actually Joe Wurzelbacher of Ohio) wants to buy a business, see– he doesn’t have the business now, he just wants to buy it and would be making “payments for years” on it– and he’s hoping the profits would be more than the $250,000 threshold for Obama’s tax cuts. If it is, his taxes will go up and a lot of that profit will be gone, when he’s just trying to fix people’s plumbing, make a living for his family, and save for his son’s college education. A tax increase means he won’t be able to hire other plumbers on– creating those jobs Obama is always talking about– and he won’t be able to buy a new truck– helping those American car companies Obama is always catering to in Detroit.

In other words, he might not be able to buy the business at all.

… I’m planning on purchasing this company – it’s not something I’m gonna purchase outright, it’s something I’m going to have to make payments on for years – but essentially I’m going to buy this company, and the profits generated by that could possibly put me in that tax bracket he’s talking about and that bothers me. It’s not like I would be rich; I would still just be a working plumber. I work hard for my money, and the fact that he thinks I make a little too much that he just wants to redistribute it to other people. Some of them might need it, but at the same time, it’s not their discretion to do it – it’s mine.

Joe says about himself:

you know, my big thing is the American Dream. I work hard. You know, I was poor; my mom raised me and my brother by herself for a very long time until my dad came along. So I know what it’s like to suffer. It’s not like I was born with a silver spoon… Eventually – I mean, just to sound a little silly here, but you need rich people. I mean, who are you going to work for?

You start giving people stuff, and then they start expecting it – and that scares me. A lot of people expect it now. They get upset when their check’s late, they get upset when they don’t get as many benefits as they used to, or when different government agencies are cut or spending is cut here and there for whatever reason – people get upset at that. And that’s because they’re used to getting it and they want more. I mean, everyone’s always gonna want more. People work the system left and right to get more out of welfare, to get more out of state assistance, federal assistance. And if government’s there for them, they’re gonna keep on trying to manipulate it to get more out of it. You got people that come along and say, “Hey, I wanna help you people,” I mean, they’re all ears! They’re like, “Hey, you can help me more, I don’t have to work as hard, I don’t have to do as much, and you’re gonna give me this? Man, that’s great, you’re a good guy.”

That is essentially what is wrong with our politics and the fundamental problem with a government such as the one we have– the tendency will always be towards bigger government, although that is not necessarily the best way to go for the long run.

So yeah, it goes down the socialist – His healthcare plan scares me. You know, I don’t like people going without healthcare, but it’s not my job to pay for everyone else’s healthcare. It’s hard enough paying for my own. I like the idea of deregulation as far as – nationally, you know, you only get insurance companies that can work in this state – if you deregulate that then you have more people competing and then the prices would go lower. It seems pretty simple to me. It probably isn’t that simple – but you flood the market with more products, usually they go down cheaper.

With just a few paragraphs, Joe has proven himself to be better at understanding basic economic facts than even a Nobel Prize-winning economist like Paul Krugman; he essentially expounded on many of the best and basic reasons why a free market economy, with rare exception, works better than a regulated, planned, socialist one: we need rich people because we all need to aspire to something. Ask anyone in this country if they want to be rich or not, and overwhelmingly they’ll say they do. Sure, some genuinely might not care, but if given the choice, we’d pretty much all prefer to be wealthy, and that’s what keeps us plumbing and garbage collecting and teaching and nursing and selling real estate. We all have the chance to be wealthy, if we work hard enough at something we’re good at. That’s why Joe the Plumber works 10 to 12 hours a day, and it’s why anyone would work 10 to 12 hours a day.

Regulation is usually ineffective and devastates competition, thereby decreasing choices for consumers and quality of services and products.

And what is Joe the Plumber’s idea of the American Dream?

Me personally, my American Dream was to have a house, a dog, a couple rifles, a bass boat. I believe in living life easy and simple. I don’t have grand designs. I don’t want much. I just wanna be able to take care of my family and do things with them outdoors and that’s about it, really. I don’t have a “grand scheme” thing. My American Dream is just more personal to me as far as working, making a good living and being able to provide for my family, college for my son. Things like that – simple things in life, that’s really what it comes down to for me. That’s my dream.

This guy deserves a New York Times column.

The Vienna Opera House is beautiful for sure, and it sells out virtually every performance far in advance. However, it never makes money and is kept going solely through the ongoing support of the Austrian government.

Freidrich Hayek might have agreed that the state could support certain industries as long as it did not hold a monopoly, specifically citing the Vienna Opera House, but Milton Friedman and I I still think it’s generally a bad idea.

To give you an idea of how bad the situation is for the Vienna Opera in regards to making a profit, the only time the Opera actually turns a profit is when there are no operas– the annual Vienna Opera Ball.

How can an independent opera house ever hope to compete with an opera house supported by the entire tax base of Austria?

How can an opera survive if one the likes of the Vienna Opera cannot turn a profit?

Should the state be involved in this sort of thing at all?

What do you think?

$50 compared to $400 for the same flights (the flights are operated by Northwest)?!? Why the huge discrepancy in fees?

Besides the fuel surcharge (that American airlines will probably also inevitably hit us all with), we can call the problem “The Chirac Tax” because it was started by France’s former president Jacques Chirac. It seems to be his only actual activity while in office (other than not invading Iraq), since as president he seems to have mainly stood inside the Elysees Palace and watched the rioting, jobless crowds out the window, without the thought occurring to him to actually be president.

Chirac loved taxing airline tickets so much he even asked the UN to tax every single international airline ticket to fight AIDS, and then he asked one more time in the name of that general catch-all, “international development.”

In other words, Chirac wanted to make it harder for normal people to visit these countries (by piling on hundreds of dollars in taxes) so that we can spend money in these countries for the precise reason that their economies suffer because no one visits them. That’s a fantastic idea! Since there seems to be no such tax on private planes, Chirac himself wouldn’t be affected, of course.

Perhaps this is Chirac’s best legacy, then. Between these taxes and the huge fuel surcharges that Air France and other European airlines are charging, I’m sure his policies are really keeping all those pesky tourists away from Paris.

The Northwest/KLM flights that my friend is taking would have cost him $50 if he had chosen to join Northwest’s frequent flyer program in the beginning rather than that of Air France. Northwest would even allow him to redeem the same amount of miles he used for this flight for Air France flights, for only $50.

In the future, he’ll be collecting Delta Skymiles rather than Flying Blue points.