war on poverty

Bill Bonner: Jailhouse humour

"We’re not going to let a little thing like forced labour spoil our Freedom Fest holiday. Anyway, it is only poor people who get caught up in the prisons’ slave market. So, we have nothing to worry about. We can hire a shyster lawyer when we need one. Besides, we like the Land of the Free. Which is to say, we appreciate hypocrisy. After all, it is the 'homage that vice pays to virtue'. Without it, virtue wouldn’t get any strokes at all. Free minds and free markets are virtues too. Nobody cares about them either. Not in America. We have the schools to shackle minds. And we have the feds to lock up, beat up, and tie up the markets." Continue reading →

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ObamaCare’s Bad Surprises Begin on October 1.

"You must have a plan by January 1, or else pay a tax to the government: 1% of your 2013 income, or $95, whichever is more. This tax will rise every year. There is a calculator to show what coverage will cost you. It shows if you are eligible for tax credits. People with low incomes will not qualify for tax credits. But they will have to pay the extra premiums. This is called 'helping the poor.' I'm on Medicare. You pay my premiums ($12,000 a year). My wife has Christian Health Care Ministries. She pays $1,000 a year. What about you? What about your children? They lose your coverage at age 26. Young people lose the subsidies at lower income than had been originally promoted." Continue reading →

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Plundering The Provinces

"The establishment media and many economists and other social scientists continually bemoan the varying income differences generated by voluntary and ever changing consumer choices on the market. In the U.S., the political class regularly and forcibly extracts a massive amount of income from productive workers, investors, and entrepreneurs via taxation and money creation ('quantitative easing' and 'zero interest-rate policies') and funnels these stolen funds into its own pockets and those of privileged financial institutions, giant agribusiness corporations, government military contractors, construction unions, etc." Continue reading →

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More Bad News for Low Wage Workers

"Soon American companies will have to disclose how their chief executive's paycheck compares with that of their average worker under a proposal unveiled by the SEC, reports The Guardian. If I am the CEO of a publicly traded company, I am going to do every thing I can to keep the ratio, between what I earn and my workers, as close as possible. This may mean shutting down operations that include many low wage workers. It may also mean automating jobs now performed by low wage workers. Low wage workers will become pariahs to be avoided at all costs by publicly traded companies. With less demand for low wage workers, their wages will decline." Continue reading →

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Minimum Wage Madness

"Switzerland is one of the few modern nations without a minimum wage law. In 2003, 'The Economist' magazine reported: 'Switzerland’s unemployment neared a five-year high of 3.9 percent in February.' In February of this year, Switzerland’s unemployment rate was 3.1 percent. A recent issue of 'The Economist' showed Switzerland’s unemployment rate as 2.1 percent. Most Americans today have never seen unemployment rates that low. However, there was a time when there was no federal minimum wage law in the United States. The last time was during the Coolidge administration, when the annual unemployment rate got as low as 1.8 percent." Continue reading →

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Krugman: “The Employment Story is Highly Unimpressive”

"Even Paul Krugman gets it. He writes: 'The measured unemployment rate is down a lot — in fact, at 7.3 percent it’s almost exactly the same as it was in November 1982 1984, when Ronald Reagan won big on claims of restored prosperity. But most of the fall in unemployment reflects lower labor force participation rather than job growth. Even if we focus on prime-age workers, so as to net out demographic effects, the employment story is highly unimpressive.'" Continue reading →

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California Approves $10 Minimum Wage; What Will Become Automated Now?

"The next time you pump gas for yourself ask yourself what happened to the gas station attendants that used to pump gas and wash your windshields. The same thing when you can't find a department store clerk. It's the same thing with those damn automated phone answering services that most firms now use, it's just too expensive to hire human operators. And its the same with grocery store baggers from days of old. Thank you minimum wage. The damage of minimum wage isn't some theoretical, you have just gotten so use to it that you have forgotten what things were like, or you are too young to know the good old days." Continue reading →

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Florida Official: “Abandon Jesus if You Want to Feed the Poor.”

"The Department of Agriculture goes to a lot of trouble getting Congress to tax Americans. This is necessary so that the USDA can buy food from farmers at above-market prices. This reduces the amount of affordable food available to the poor. The USDA gives it away to state agencies. These agencies then give it away to charitable groups. They in turn give food to the hungry. One non-profit outfit in Florida has given away free food for 31 years. But not any longer. It turns out that this group — Christian — mentions Jesus to the poor people it ministers to. It took 31 years for some low-level government bureaucrat to put two and two together. 'What’s this? They talk about Jesus? Well, that’s got to stop.'" Continue reading →

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Feds sending free mobile phones to dead people: congressman

"Dead people don’t need cell phones. That’s the message Rep. Tim Griffin of Arkansas wants to send Congress, after he says a controversial government-backed program that helps provide phones to low-income Americans ended up sending mobiles to the dead relatives of his constituents. Griffin has introduced a bill that targets the phone hand-out program, which has ballooned into a fiscal headache for the government." Continue reading →

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Free Lunches for All Students in Boston

"The federal government has taken a chunk of taxpayers’ money and handed it over to Boston’s tax-funded schools. The money will be used to supply free lunches for all students. There will be no means-testing. Rich kids will get free meals. Why? So as to avoid the sense of shame in the hearts of poor kids, who might see their families as charity cases, which of course they are. Reality is painful. Self-awareness is painful. Politicians spend their careers trying to find ways to shield voters from reality." Continue reading →

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