Stephen Fincher, a Republican candidate for congress in Tennessee's 8th district, favors small-government, lower taxes, and he has an appropriate disdain for Obamacare.The rant continues for a few more paragraphs, explaining how Brazil was going to retaliate with tariffs on our exported cotton because of Uncle Sam giving handouts to Welfare Queens like Fincher. We compromised by buying most of the Brazilian Cotton crop. I swear to God, that's how we solved the problem.
Good for him.
He's also a gospel singer.
He's a succesful cotton farmer.
And in one eleven-year period, from 1995 - to 2006, Fincher and his wife received 2.5 million dollars in crop subsidies fromgovernmentyou.
Now, just for the sheer joy of it, imagine if the Democrats dared to nominate a traditional welfare queen for Congress. Someone who sits around the house all day, collecting welfare and producing little babies who will reliably vote for Democrats. Do you think there might be an uproar?
So what is there about this form of welfare that bathes Stephen Fincher in such down-home, cottony goodness?
When our government subsidizes a particular crop, it confuses the price signals. In a truly free market, if too much cotton was produced, the price would drop. Fewer people would grow cotton. The price would then reflect what people were willing to pay for it, and what farmers would willingly be paid to grow it.
If not enough cotton was on the market, the price would rise. More and more people would grow cotton until the price dropped again.
Are Obama and Pelosi and Reid paying too many people to grow cotton? We'll never know.
But are you having to pay too much for cotton T-shirts, shirts, socks and sheets because of farm subsidies and prohibitive tariffs on cotton imports? Hell yes.
Fincher has said his farm would have shut down without the subsidies, which he argued protect American farmers from more heavily subsidized foreign competition. "We would be all for not having government in our business," Fincher told the Washington Post in 2010, "but we need a fair system."You think that farming has "some uncertainties inherent to the industry"??? Try building fruitstands. Open a restaurant. Start a used bookstore. Open a clothing store. Go into the carwash business. Drive a semi-truck. Those businesses open and struggle and crash and burn every day.
The federal government's complex system of farm subsidies is supposed to shield farmers from some of the uncertainties inherent to the industry, but critics like the Environmental Working Group say the safety net unfairly benefits the biggest farms at the expense of smaller ones.
The only proper role of government in the economic realm is to protect property rights, adjudicate disputes, and provide a legal framework in which voluntary trade is protected. All efforts by government to redistribute wealth, or to control or manage trade, are improper in a free society.Back in 2008, the voters put in a president and a congress who didn't believe in those simple principles. Or, to put it more accurately, Obama and congress wanted to back a few trailers up to The Treasury and start hauling off some loot.
Since Obama’s first full month in office in February 2009, the unemployment rate has gone from terrible (8.3 percent) to very bad (7.5 percent). But a true picture of just how bad the unemployment situation is in our country is revealed by the fact that more than 9.5 million people have dropped out of the labor force since the president took office in 2009. Undoubtedly, the impact of this number is reflected in some of the other indices and statistics that we can use to objectively measure the success of the Obama presidency.Well, the Washington Post should've mentioned who has done well under The Coming Of The Obamassiah, just to be fair. Here's Investor's Business Daily:
In the past five years, 9.5 million people have quit working and the current labor force participation rate is just 63.6 percent, the lowest it’s been since May 1979. More than 15.2 million more people are on food stamps today than were in February 2009, and during the same time frame, the poverty rate has increased by 0.7 percent.
Gasoline prices have almost doubled under Obama, and there’s nothing more corrosive for the middle class than when more cash comes out of everyone’s pockets at the pump. This is especially true given that the median household income has dropped more than $3,000 during the Obama presidency.
All the while we have experienced the biggest jump in our national debt in history under Obama, with the debt exploding from $11 trillion at the end of 2008 to almost $17 trillion today. And I’ll point out once again that if we look at this huge number in more relatable terms, our current national debt translates to a cost of more than $148,000 per taxpayer, up from just over $90,000 per taxpayer in 2008.
Even the infamous “Misery Index,” created by Jimmy Carter, has gotten worse under the Obama presidency. Remember, the Misery Index is the unemployment rate plus the inflation rate. In January 2009, the index was 7.83, but as of March 2013, it increased to 9.07.
It’s safe to say that the above statistics are key benchmarks of the U.S. economy. You can pick through other available figures and try to find some small pieces of good news, but by any measure, what these data show is that things have gotten worse rather than better for many Americans during Obama’s tenure.
Using Census data on net worth, the Pew report found that from 2009 to 2011, the richest 7% of Americans saw their net worth climb an average $697,651 — equal to a 28% gain.As I've noted before on these pages, if you look at the top 1% of wealthy counties in the U.S., half of them are the 13 or so surrounding Washington D.C. The government spend more than $60,000.00 per poor family on anti-poverty programs. Somehow, I think a lot of money gets sent to D.C. and stays in D.C.
The rest of the country saw their net worth drop an average $6,079 — equal to a 4% loss.
As a result, far from making the country more equal, Obama's policies have produced a greater concentration of wealth, with the share of wealth held by the top 7% rising to 63% in 2011, up from 56% in 2009, Pew found.
The only proper role of government in the economic realm is to protect property rights, adjudicate disputes, and provide a legal framework in which voluntary trade is protected. All efforts by government to redistribute wealth, or to control or manage trade, are improper in a free society.
In fact, the critical assumptions on which the economic case for free trade rests are highly descriptive of reality: (1) the ultimate justification for economic activity is to improve living standards for consumers; (2) producers facing competition serve consumers better than do monopolists; (3) each party to a voluntary trade is generally made better off by such trades; and – most importantly – (4) the first three assumptions aren’t nullified merely by putting a national political border between consumers and producers.The lines of latitude and longitude of the factory don't matter to anyone but Statists collecting payoffs from Crony Capitalists. Do you really want to ensure that your child has a factory job putting plastic cases on iPhones??? I don't. And you don't.
“The current average debt-to-asset ratio in the farm sector is less than 9 percent and has been declining steadily over the past decade. Moreover, farms fail at a rate of less than one in two hundred a year, and, from a financial perspective, farms are better placed than almost any sector of the economy to handle year-to-year variations in revenues and costs by themselves. Yet, effectively, farmers want a tax payer-funded guarantee that their revenues will never fall below about 90 percent of their recent levels.I'll throw in some more about "shallow loss" programs in a moment. If you can't stand the suspense, go to the end of this post, and prepare to be depressed about the gullibility of the American public.
“This bill represents significant reform,” said Senator Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan and chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. “It cuts subsidies, it cuts the deficit and it creates jobs.”Debbie, you ignorant slut.
Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas and the ranking member on the committee, called the legislation the best bill possible. “It shows what can happen if we break the logjam of partisanship and work together to get something done,” Mr. Roberts said.
Shallow-loss programs are costly: Depending on structure and crop prices, these programs could cost the taxpayer as much as or more than the direct payments program they would replace, averaging as much as $8 to $14 billion a year over the next five years.
I have written before about government corporate subsidies and attempts at venture capital investment in the context of the “big shot” effect. Many times I have come to suspect the biggest beneficiary of these programs is to the administrators themselves, who have no money of their own and wouldn’t ever be trusted to manage a private portfolio but get to act as “big shots” with other peoples’ money. They get the psychic benefit of being little junior Donald Trumps.Every libertarian I've ever met believes that giving subsidies, quotas, tax breaks and (ahem) "incentives" to some segments of the economy is a bad thing. It gives bureaucrats and politicians a chance to pick winners and losers, reward friends and punish enemies.
As an economic system, fascism is socialism with a capitalist veneer. The word derives from fasces, the Roman symbol of collectivism and power: a tied bundle of rods with a protruding ax. In its day (the 1920s and 1930s), fascism was seen as the happy medium between boom-and-bust-prone liberal capitalism, with its alleged class conflict, wasteful competition, and profit-oriented egoism, and revolutionary Marxism, with its violent and socially divisive persecution of the bourgeoisie. Fascism substituted the particularity of nationalism and racialism—“blood and soil”—for the internationalism of both classical liberalism and Marxism.Let's see....we've got a Department Of Energy jacking around with fuel prices. Jeff Immelt of G.E. is whispering sweet nothings into Obama's ear while he outlaws bulbs he doesn't like and mandates the ones G.E. can make overseas. Washington will soon be in charge of healthcare. It appears that Monsanto has written more laws than any senator who ever lived, trying to control the freakin' food supply. And on and on and on.....
Where socialism sought totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners. Where socialism nationalized property explicitly, fascism did so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the “national interest”—that is, as the autocratic authority conceived it. (Nevertheless, a few industries were operated by the state.) Where socialism abolished all market relations outright, fascism left the appearance of market relations while planning all economic activities. Where socialism abolished money and prices, fascism controlled the monetary system and set all prices and wages politically. In doing all this, fascism denatured the marketplace.
When the Mercado itself last made news, it had just landed its first tenant after more than five years of sitting empty and neglected.And I hope the cashier remembered to give him his change back after the purchase. The Mercado isn't quite as empty as the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem, but it's close.
What was supposed to be the pillar of a $6.5 million Northside redevelopment – an authentic Mexican marketplace – had failed to ignite the expected growth along North Main Street.
....It seemed like a good idea at the time: Bring economic development to Fort Worth’s near Northside by developing an area of shops, restaurants and stalls – a Mercado, reflecting the heritage of the mostly Hispanic residents of the neighborhood – and, in the process tie the touristy Stockyards District to downtown.
It started with a sidewalk, an expensive three-block-long sidewalk, in the alley between the mostly dilapidated buildings in the 1400 block of North Main Street and the houses that backed up to them. The plan was for local merchants to set up stalls to sell their goods to tourists who would make their way from the Stockyards area, several city blocks away. The city spent about $1.5 million to pave the alley and renovate the Rose Marine Theater.
Then came the Mercado de Fort Worth building, the brainstorm of local developer Deyla Guadiana. It was supposed to be a 58,000-square-foot, Mexican-style marketplace three stories high that would be the focal point of the Mercado area. Guadiana got a $3.1 million loan from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and construction began in 2003.
The city tried to spur interest in both the walkway and the Mercado building by offering low-interest loans and a building site to anyone willing to take a risk. They didn’t find many takers.
Guadiana defaulted on the loan after failing to come up with the private financing to cover the remainder of the construction costs and the city took back the property, taking over the note and spending $1.3 million from a special economic development fund to finish the building.
Finding a buyer took years.
