The long-awaited announcement of another bout of money printing in England on this Thursday will prove once again that experience doesn’t modify behavior on the other side of the pond either. The initial round of money expansion, called Quantitative Easing (QE) in the States, of some $320 billion last year in the United Kingdom had little measurable effect.

And so another boost of $80 billion is expected in Thursday’s announcement. This round, according to George Buckley, a UK economist at Deutsche Bank, might not be the last: “If sentiment and activity hold up this could…be the last round of QU, although the fragile nature of the recovery and the situation in Europe could mean [that] the programme continues after May.”

The trouble is that “sentiment and activity” is slowing, pushing England’s GDP into negative territory with downward revisions for the balance of the year expected. The British Office for National Statistics reported “negative growth” (American translation: decline) of 0.2% in the last three months of 2011, and there is little hope for any change in direction for at least the next two years.

Roger Bootle, writing for the British paper The Telegraph, wondered out loud what good additional printing would do. He asked rhetorically three weeks ago, “Once it has completed the current authorized dollop, the Bank of England (BoE) may soon conduct yet more QE. But

Continue reading Printing Money Doesn’t Work in Britain Either

When Oklahoma State Senator David Holt discovered that Oklahoma was ranked the “most anti-taxpayer state in the southern United States” by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), he decided to propose amending the state’s constitution to stop the unions’ gravy train of collective bargaining contracts without taxpayer approval. His amendment says nothing about unions or collective bargaining. All he did was explain, in his press release, that if the amendment were passed, the constitution would allow local taxpayers to approve all spending of their tax dollars by local authorities for any purpose. He stated:

Oklahoma’s Constitution already makes it very difficult to raise taxes, and that’s a good thing. But every new tax starts with a new expense, and the Oklahoma Constitution, remarkably, does not give taxpayers or their local elected representatives the absolute power to spend tax dollars.

There are dozens of examples in recent years of local taxpayers being forced to take on new financial obligations, not only without the consent of either the taxpayers or their representatives, but actually over their objections.

And though he never mentions unions or dues extracted from union members’ paychecks to be spent for political purposes or benefits or pensions or job security—they are his target. Because of collective bargaining agreements, unions have routinely overridden

Continue reading Oklahoma’s Constitutional Amendment Would Pit Taxpayers Against Unions

The news released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Friday appeared to be all good: The unemployment rate was down by 0.2 percent to 8.3 percent, the lowest since the month after President Obama was inaugurated. November and December estimates were revised upward. Most private industries showed growth, including 70,000 new business services jobs, 50,000 new manufacturing jobs, and a remarkable 21,000 new jobs in the construction industry. The labor force expanded by 500,000 which appeared to indicate that more people are coming back into the market looking for work.

But the skeptics were legion: the Wall Street Journal, while accepting the numbers at face value, said, “Even with the recent gains, this is by far the worst jobs recovery since the Great Depression, and the U.S. still has about 5.5 million fewer jobs that it did before the recession began in December 2007.” Across town, the Washington Times said the numbers looked better than they should because of the number of young people dropping out and the paper even found an economist at the Federal Reserve to agree with it. Brian Holter, who works at the Minneapolis Fed, said: “However these factors stack up, the improvement in unemployment is largely the work of declining participation rates and, unfortunately, not job growth.”

, writing at Townhall.com, was blunt in his assessment of the BLS report:

Continue reading Friday’s Unemployment Numbers: Correcting the Corrections

King had earlier released a statement regarding his endorsement, saying:

“Governor Romney has the leadership qualities, experience, and credentials to make him best suited for carrying the conservative Republican banner into the November Presidential election, defeat Barack Obama, and put this great nation back on the path to prosperity and strength. We have a country to save, and Mitt Romney is the candidate best able to lead us in doing that.”

About 350 people were on hand to hear Gov. Romney at the standing room only rally at the Country Inn in Grand Junction. Another 200 or so stood listening outside on speakers set up for those people who were turned away at the door by Grand Junction fire marshals.

Most in the crowd were Romney supporters; a few, however, remained undecided and had stopped by simply to hear from one of the candidates in hopes of gathering enough information to make an informed decision come caucus time the following night. Some of these seemed to come away from the rally impressed by what they saw and heard.

Harry Benjamin, of Grand Junction, said he was not a Romney supporter before attending the event. But after hearing the former Massachusetts Governor speak, said he liked what he had heard.

“He is a successful manager, and that is what we need” Benjamin said.

Some attendees had been to Rick Santorum’s event in nearby Montrose two days earlier, and drew comparisons between the two candidates. Matt Soper, a Delta resident and recent law school graduate, attended both events and said that to him, “the difference between Santorum and Romney was the difference between someone running for governor, and one running for President”, saying that Romney’s speech, attitude and demeanor seemed to be more professional and ”presidential”. In terms of substance, Soper said that he was gratified to hear Romney honor the U.S. military in his speech, and speak on foreign policy, noting that “Santorum only spoke of the military when prompted by a question, and I found that rather disappointing”.

Followers of Romney’s rivals were present as well. Judy O’Dwyer, also of Grand Junction, said that she was a Rick Santorum supporter, but had come to hear what Romney had to say, and to see if she could concider him trustworthy. “I have my doubts about him; I don’t know if he is conservative enough for me” she said prior to the event. She did, however, go on to state that she would support Romney fully if he became the candidate.

Other opponents were not so accommodating. About a dozen Ron Paul supporters were on hand to protest the candidate at the event. Local Palisade peach farmer David Cox, a prominent supporter of the Texas Congressman, said that they were there to raise awareness of Romney’s support for TARP and the recently signed National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), in particular the controversial provision that allows for indefinite detention of U.S. citizens found to be enemy combatants engaged in hostilities against the U.S., thereby, according to Cox, “eliminating the right of due process and habeas corpus”. Asked whether or not he would support Romney in the event that he won the nomination, Cox replied no, saying that he “cannot support any candidate that is in favor of presidential or military authority to arrest and detain civilians not engaged in a battlefield situtation under the law of war rather than the due process requirements spelled out in the US Constitution”. Cox told PPC that he was thrown out of the event; “I began raising my voice and informing people and that’s when the staff had me ejected”. No other incidents were reported.

Overall, however, the reception from the west slope to Mitt Romney seemed generally approving, and crossed demographic lines. Kristina Kelly, a young Grand Junction resident in her early 20’s, and Sheryl Wilson, a retiree, both touted Romney’s values and business experience as essential for leading America out of her current troubles. Fruita Iraq Veteran Sean Otto said Romney was the “only one who has a record for turning things around”, citing his history in Massachusetts, the Olympics, and in the business world.

For West Slope voters, Romneys biggest applause line came when he spoke of energy, an issue critical to the economy of the region rich in natural gas, coal, and oil shale. In a speech that mostly stuck to the script of his last several appearances, Romney criticized Obama’s record on energy policy, noting that the current President has kept hundreds of acres off limits for production, while subsidizing so-called “green energy” boondoggles – contrary to his call in the State of the Union speech for an “all of the above” policy.

Romney’s promises to reign in the EPA and to help facilitate domestic production of “energy secure and independent from foreign cartels” met with approval from West Slope residents. Harry Benjamin, when asked if Romney’s message appealed to the average west slope voter, replied “Yes, especially based on what he said about energy.”

Norm Franke, President of Alpine Bank in Grand Junction agreed. “Romney does appeal to people on the Western Slope when he talks of energy development” he said. “Romney told the audience the right things. It will be nice if he will do them.”

At the time, some justified leaking Bork’s rental history to the press, and the media’s willingness to publish, on the grounds that Bork had himself not been a terribly strong advocate of privacy.  A move intended to embarrass Bork instead scared Congress, many of whose members no doubt patronized niche video rental stores and had built up truly scandalous rental histories.

In response, we got the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act, a piece of direct legislation forbidding video renters from disclosing a customer’s checkout history without explicit consent.  At one point, it would have fair to say this was something of a misstep down the road of favoring painfully specific laws over common sense.  Libertarians, such as I, would have said that service providers who sell or give away their customers purchase history would be punished efficiently through market mechanisms.

Things, to put it lightly, are changing.  Our personal information is worth more and more and to ever greater numbers of people – often strangers and discrete data-mining companies.  Technology allows integration of that data to a level inconceivable in the late 80s.  Back then, the fear was that the reading and movie-watching habits of public figures would be publicized to humiliate those people.  Today, the reality is that each and every one of us is a monetized prize; sold, resold, and bundled to the highest bidder.

Enter Netflix.  Streaming movie providers have run up against VPPA before.  In 2008, Blockbuster got into hot water over violating customer privacy via a partnership with FaceBook Beacon.  The next year, Netflix was answering questions over its practice of divulging user data as part of a contest to improve the algorithm by which the company recommends films.  And now, the inevitable is here.  Netflix and FaceBook would like to fully integrate their services, with every film you watch shared with your ‘friends’ for the purpose of fine-tuning movie picks.

Uh-huh.

The problem with the collision of technology and privacy concerns is very much about ostensibly ‘free’ services actually being an exchange of online services for personal information.  Make no mistake, we pay for everything we get one way or another.  That’s fine if it’s an agreement with informed consent.  As well you know if you pay any attention at all to privacy issues, this is a vanishingly rare thing when it comes to social media.

Under VPPA as it stands, Netflix may not be able to legally share that data on an ongoing basis.  More accurately, Netflix is afraid that VPPA doesn’t give it as much protection from angry users as it would like to enjoy.  Obviously, both Netflix and FaceBook would like to share as much data as possible and to do it all as an obscure opt-out, if they can.  To that end, the former company has gone before Congress, asking for a ‘clarification’ of VPPA, along with asking users to urge their Representatives to support that position.  The proposed legislation here is H.R. 2471, which would explicitly make it legal for a company, such as Netflix, to get a one-time consent from a user to share data indefinitely, until that consent is revoked.

Here, again, I make my objection that more and more laws will make some people feel safer, but won’t actually improve the grace with which private data are handled by third parties.  VPPA originally had language banning magazine publishers from disclosing subscriber data, something that fell prey to lobbyists.  Between 1988 and today, the PATRIOT Act has gutted much of heft behind laws we may think protect our privacy.  Why is the answer to the quagmire of legally protected user data yet another law, and an absurdly precise one at that?

On that note, the mere fact that companies with perfectly dreadful privacy records are backing H.R. 2471 ought to raise eyebrows ad questions.  Too, why does a company that has enacted two painful price hikes in the last sixteen months, all while the quality and selection of its offerings decline, now need Washington’s blessing to make more money off the data of people who are already paying customers?

What Netflix is really doing here is pushing for a highly specific law that will render it immune to the complaints of users down the road.  If the extent of Netflix’s planned expansion is to get an informed and explicit consent and then share data only for the purpose of delivering better movie recommendations to users, it’s hard to imagine why they would require federal legislation with such narrow focus.

Patrick Leahy, author of VPPA, described, “an era of interactive television cables, the growth of computer checking and check-out counters, of security systems and telephones, all lodged together in computers….”  That was 1988.  Last week, he neatly summed the problems with HR. 2471; “A one-time check off that has the effect of an all-time surrender of privacy does not seem to me the best course for consumers.”  He’s right.  However, let’s take it a little further.  A law like this comes too close to making peoples’ privacy decisions for them, and flirts with giving Congressional benediction to unethical data-mining.

I go back to my position that people should be their own first privacy guardians.  That means common sense, skepticism, and scrutiny of any bid to share their information ‘for their own good’.  I dislike laws that infantilize consumers, that make dangerous behavior seem harmless with the veneer of legal acceptability, that distort the market.

Netflix wants customers to waive privacy now and forever and just trust that things will turn out hunky-dory.  Yet they want a law essentially guaranteeing they won’t have to answer for their behavior in the future.  To me, that says they anticipate angry customers over the proposed data sharing.  And it says they don’t want to play by the same rules they are suggesting for the rest of us.

When Hollywood film director James Cameron (Avatar, Titanic, Terminator) announced that he was moving to New Zealand, preppers, fiscal doomsayers, and alarmists had a field day in deciphering his motives for moving, ultimately deciding that Cameron was moving so that he is better able to weather the massive monetary upheaval that is upcoming or he is escaping U.S. taxes and regulations.

Marc Slavo, as an example, suggested ulterior motives other than those stated by Cameron: “While the move for the Canadian-born Cameron may initially be perceived as a rejection or denouncement of American policies and ideals…[he] may have ulterior motivations as evidenced by where he’s planning on moving and what he’s planning on doing once he gets there.”

The Associated Press reported that Cameron successfully applied to buy 2,500 acres of farmland and he “intend[s] to reside indefinitely in New Zealand and [is] acquiring the property to reside on and operate as a working farm.” Slavo is skeptical in light of Cameron’s lack of need to be working at all, having made in excess of $250 million last year, according to Salon magazine.

And Slavo is not persuaded that Cameron’s real reason is to be closer to the New Zealand headquarters of Weta Digital, which won an Oscar for its special effects in the movie Avatar. Nor is he persuaded that Cameron wants to be there solely to direct the sequel to Avatar scheduled to begin later this year. Slavo instead is thinking that Cameron knows that

Continue reading Rich Americans Are Fleeing the Country

Two advisers to the Obama administration during the creation of the law known as ObamaCare exposed in the New York Times on Wednesday one of the predictable consequences of that law: the end of health insurance companies in America.

Authors Ezekiel Emanuel and Jeffrey Liebman then reviewed all the ways that the new “accountable care organizations” will allegedly improve the delivery of healthcare after those greedy, nasty, selfish, profit-seeking insurance companies are out of the way. The article is so filled with misstatements, half-truths, and just plain lies that only a few of the more egregious ones can be addressed here:

Health insurance companies usually…provide insurance; they take a premium and assume financial responsibility for paying the bills. But the amount of risk sharing that is accomplished is limited because the insurance companies charge premiums that vary, depending upon the health of an individual or a group…. [They] use their data and market power to identify healthy people to cover and unhealthy people to exclude from coverage.

Correction: Health insurance companies, in a free and open market, provide insurance by contracting with individuals or groups to provide a service: coverage according to that contract. Premiums are charged according to the best estimate those companies make about what it will cost for them to provide the coverage. They do not “take” premiums by force, but try to

Just when CoreLogic, the California-based mortgage data provider, began to wax optimistic about the housing market, the Census Bureau and the S&P/Case-Shiller index doused their enthusiasm with some cold facts and daunting data.

CoreLogic noted in its January report that single-family permits and starts rose at a 15-percent annual rate over the six months ending November 2011. In addition, existing home sales appeared to be trending higher as well, increasing by about 12 percent from January to November. The tone in their note to clients was guardedly optimistic:

While we cannot say with a high degree of certainty what 2012 has in store for us, indications based on the latter part of 2011 are that both the broad economy and the housing market are moving toward positive growth in 2012.

And then, on January 31, the Census Bureau released its fourth-quarter report on home ownership: the rate was 66 percent, extending the decline from the 69 percent reached in 2005, just before the housing bubble burst, and rivaling the rate last seen in 1997, 14 years ago. Economist Mark Perry developed a visually stunning graph for his blog and concluded:

Continue reading Housing: Prices and Ownership Still Correcting

In the summary of its “Budget and Economic Outlook” published on Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) noted the supportability of deficit spending even under its “alternative” analysis. Noted the CBO: “Even if the fiscal policies specified by current law come to pass, budgetary challenges over the longer term remain—and the challenges will be much more acute if those policies do not remain in place.” It added:

Under both CBO’s baseline and its alternative fiscal scenario, the aging of the population and rising costs for health care will push spending for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal health care programs considerably higher as a percentage of GDP. If that rising level of spending is coupled with revenues that are held close to the average share of GDP that they have represented for the past 40 years (rather than being allowed to increase, as under current law), the resulting deficits will increase federal debt to unsupportable levels.

In non-economic terms, then, the CBO is saying that no matter how one looks at the numbers, the United States is headed for disaster.

Using assumptions that current law remains in place—with the Bush tax cuts disappearing—revenues in 2013 and beyond will increase by an astonishing $800 billion, and yet even that enormous tax hike isn’t enough to close the gap between expenditures and taxes. The CBO even took into account that inflation will drive peoples’ incomes into higher tax brackets, subjecting more of their taxable income to higher rates of taxation, and still that wasn’t enough. In that “steady-state” scenario the national debt, currently pushing $16 trillion, would

Continue reading CBO Report: U.S. Deficits “Unsupportable”

Monday’s meeting of the European Union in Brussels resulted in agreement of 25 of the 27 member states to inflict upon themselves and their hapless and increasingly powerless citizenry the tools of international fiscal dictatorship.

The purpose of the “fiscal pact” is to enforce “budgetary discipline” so that the present euro crisis can be contained and future such crises averted. In the short run that means granting the European Central Bank (ECB) additional power to expand its reserves so that bailouts to failing countries can continue, subject to enforcement rules. In the longer run, the pact puts in place the primary tool of coercion, the European Stability Mechanism, to be effective in July.

European Council President Herman Van Rompuy said that initially the ESM will be limited to just €500 billion ($650 billion) but that the ultimate number “will be reassessed down the line.”

Critics say that’s the entire purpose of the ESM: to set up the mechanism of control under the guise of providing bailout funds to members in need while installing ruling class elites (bankers with ties to Goldman Sachs) out of reach of the taxpayer class. Angela Merkel, German Chancellor and mouthpiece for the ESM, was clear: “It is an important step forward to a stability union. For those looking at the union and the euro from the outside, it is very important to show this commitment.”

She failed to mention that Great Britain and the Czech Republic have both

Continue reading European Fiscal Pact: Closing the Ring