Blast from the past: 'Daily Show' destroys Berkeley liberals protesting the Marines
This week's hilarious "Daily Show" segment destroying the UFCW of Nevada for its hypocrisy brought to mind another amazing "Daily Show" segment. In this one, the show takes on liberals in Berkeley protesting the Marine Corps. The segment's a couple of years old, but it's just as funny today as it was than.
Read moreIf high taxes solved budget problems, California would be golden
Thursday [yesterday] marks the 85th day California has gone without a budget, shattering previous records with no deal in sight.While reports are coming out today that a compromise might be in the works for early next week, California's budget problems are projected to continue for years to come.
The estimated deficit is $19.14 billion. And closing that gap is a daunting challenge given deep divisions over cuts and taxes.
In Nevada, leftist legislators blame our budget problems on our state's supposedly too-low tax burden. But what about California? While Nevada has only a sales tax (6.85 percent), California has an income tax (top rate: 10.55 percent), a corporate income tax (8.84 percent) and a sales tax (8.25 percent).
If high taxes prevented budget problems, California would be swimming in budgetary surpluses. Instead, it is delaying payment to its vendors.
The common thread between California and Nevada is that each increased its inflation-adjusted, per-capita spending by more than 29 percent over the last 15 years.
High taxes don't solve budget problems; they simply create bigger ones in the future - as both California and Nevada can attest to.
Capitalist Hollywood hates capitalism
To merit pay or not to merit pay
A new Vanderbilt University study on merit pay - the most rigorous ever conducted - shows that a merit-pay plan in Tennessee had no statistically significant impact on student achievement. That is the bad news. The good news is that it also produced none of the doom-and-gloom predictions that unions normally attach to the concept of merit pay.
Eric Hanushek (Stanford University) notes that the study did not examine the long-term effects of attracting higher-quality teachers to the profession via merit pay (they no longer have to wait 15 years to maximize their salary). We already know that the average teacher today is recruited from the bottom third of college graduates and that paying teachers more money doesn't attract better teachers (we just pay more money for the same talent pool), so maybe merit pay has the long-term potential to attract higher-quality teachers. At this point, we still don't know.
Dr. Matthew Ladner (vice president of research at the Goldwater Institute and a policy fellow at the Nevada Policy Research Institute) still supports the idea of merit pay (for reasons including those given by Eric Hanushek) and wonders why merit pay worked in Little Rock, Ark., but not in Tennessee. He thinks more research on the right way to do merit pay is still needed.
Dr. Jay P. Greene (University of Arkansas) claims to have always been skeptical of merit pay (and now is even more skeptical). He reasons that creating market forces (via merit pay) won't work when the teachers are still operating within an uncompetitive, government-controlled monopoly. According to Dr. Greene, the whole system needs to change.
Cartoon: Charlie Brown, Lucy, a football and fooling the public into accepting tax increases
I've been thinking a bit more about David McGrath Schwartz's article on the number of times liberal legislators and government bureaucrats have lied to Nevada's citizens about the impact of budget cuts (or a spending increase that's not as large as they wanted). Schwartz notes that Nevada's citizens have heard four rounds of overblown and inaccurate "dire predictions."
Hmmm, where have we seen this before?
To read the text, you might need to click on the picture to enlarge it. Don't quit your day job, Professor
"I know this 'cause mar-gin-al u-til-i-ty
Sheds pro-per light on e-con-o-my."
I am full of song this morning after having stumbled across some sheet music for songs that were written and sung by Professor von Mises and his inner circle of colleagues and students while he taught at the University of Vienna. The Mises Institute has published the sheet music for these songs in a new compilation.
The compilation includes such timely classics as "Downfall of the Business Cycle," "The Mises-Mayer Debate," and "The Scientist and the Methodologist." These riveting melodies and profound lyrics will greatly expand anyone's appreciation of economists who have elected not to put their viewpoints into verse!
Unions have lost the war of ideas
With the upcoming nationwide release of the education documentary "Waiting for Superman" by director Davis Guggenheim (Inconvient Truth) - which takes a critical look at the failure of American public education - Dr. Jay P. Greene (University of Arkansas) and Dr. Greg Forster (Kern Family Foundation) have announced that the unions have officially lost the war of ideas on education.
It is only a matter of time before the education unions (which influence more than just education) are replaced with professional service organizations that treat teachers like professional adults rather than cannon fodder.
Authoritarian denounces capitalism as 'undemocratic'
President Ahmadinejad of Iran blamed capitalism for global poverty and called it an undemocratic and unjust institution in front of the United Nations today. He, of course, is completly wrong.
Allegations of human-rights abuses, voter fraud and state suppression of protests in 2009 mar Ahmadinejad's credibility. But then again, he is president of Iran, a country ranked as "unfree" by the non-partisan Freedom House. Iran also suppresses the media (capitalism doesn't suppress the press), as citizens can only get government-approved news.
Iran does not have enough political or civil freedom to be considered a democracy. In fact, Iran's political rights and civil liberties are given the second-lowest score possible by Freedom House.
Oh, the irony is not missed on us.
Of course, capitalism has done more to reduce poverty than anything. Period. Capitalism has not only lifted billions out of abject poverty, it has produced the technological gains that now allow the world to host more than 6 billion humans.
Capitalism is also more democratic than democracy. Think about it. Democracy serves (at worst) 51 percent of the people, and it is never surprising when it pushes one-size-fits-all policies on voters. But what about capitalism? How many types of TV stations are there? Magazines? Computers? Books? Music? Cars? Clothes? Almost anything you want, you can get, even if you are in the minority.
Only an authoritarian (or someone who is out of touch with reality, which authoritarians usually are) would denounce capitalism as undemocratic and unjust while claiming it has done nothing to help the poor.
The fall of Rizzo
Remember Robert Rizzo, the Bell, Calif., city manager who got himself 12-percent-a-year pay increases for nearly 20 years, allowing him to retire at an annual salary of nearly $800,000 (earning him a sizeable pension for the rest of his life)?
Apparently, that money wasn't enough. Rizzo, along with seven other city officials, has been arrested on corruption charges. Rizzo apparently made $1.9 million worth of loans to himself and paid himself an additional $4.3 million through the city's other contracts. Other city officials combined to pay themselves an additional $1.25 million.
Contrary to what you might hear in the media or from talking heads, working for the government does not magically make greed and corruption disappear from your system. Let me repeat that point in another way: Working for government does not convert you into an angel.
Watch this: Daily Show destroys UFCW of Nevada
The Daily Show did a hilarious segment last night exposing the hypocrisy of the United Food and Commercial Workers of Nevada.
What did the UFCW do? It hired non-union workers to protest Wal-Mart's opposition to unions.
This segment is unbelievably funny -- especially watching the union spokesman being confronted with his own hypocrisy. Watch this and then pass it on.
So funny to hear the union official being interviewed start defending hiring minimum-wage workers, because they're doing the best they can with limited resources. Sounds like this union official knows why we can't raise the minimum wage to $100 an hour.
Just another example of liberal hypocrisy.
