Revealing Data on Poverty

Interesting data on poverty in the city, state, and percent of people below the poverty level:

1. Detroit, MI 32.5%
2. Buffalo, NY 29.9%
3. Cincinnati, OH 27.8%
4. Cleveland, OH 27.0%
5. Miami, FL 26.9%
6. St. Louis, MO 26.8%
7. El Paso, TX 26.4%
8. Milwaukee, WI 26.2%
9. Philadelphia, PA 25.1%
10. Newark, NJ 24.2%

U.S. Census Bureau, 2006 American Community Survey, August 2007

What do the top ten cities (over 250,000) with the highest poverty rate all have in common?

Detroit, MI (1st on the poverty rate list) hasn't elected a Republican mayor since 1961;
Buffalo, NY (2nd) hasn't elected one since 1954;
Cincinnati, OH (3rd)...since 1984;
Cleveland, OH (4th)...since 1989;
Miami, FL (5th) has never had a Republican mayor;
St. Louis, MO (6th)....since 1949;
El Paso, TX (7th) has never had a Republican mayor;
Milwaukee, WI (8th)...since 1908;
Philadelphia, PA (9th)...since 1952;
Newark , NJ (10th)...since 1907.

Einstein once said, 'The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.'
It is the poor who habitually elect Democrats---yet they are still poor...

You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. You cannot build character and courage by taking away people's initiative and independence. You cannot help people permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.
- Abraham Lincoln

Ron Paul On Fox Business News 03/25/09 Part 1

Where Are You Milton, When We Need You?

After last night's speech by BHO it is pretty clear America in on the decline. He is a fool. The Democrats, Republicans, and media are a club of economic illiterates. Here's a clip for those of you who need inspirational words.

The Stimulus Package Is More Debt We Don't Need

"Less than 10% of the bill could be considered true stimulus, if one assumes tax credits and infrastructure spending will jolt the economy. The other 90% of the bill represents one of the most egregious acts of generational theft in our nation's history, with taxpayer money going to special-interest earmarks, an ill-conceived bailout to states, and permanent spending increases that expand government's reach in areas like health care and education."
More ... (Source: The Wall Street Journal)
____________________________________________________________________

Watching Our Rulers Destroy Our World
"Our rulers are destroying the economy. Not little by little, as they usually do, but in huge swaths. Each great assault on the free market, whether it be denominated a bailout, a stimulus, or some other species of purported salvation, brings us visibly closer to the complete ruin of an economic order that required centuries to build. Awestruck, as if we were observing a tsunami sweep across an island, we can only watch the rulers' devastating actions, for which, strange to say, they expect the public to be grateful - and truth be told, most people are grateful, and clamor for more of the same. We listen to the kingpins' lunatic ravings as they describe their perceptions of the current situation and solemnly declare their determination to "do something" to restore the prosperity that they themselves have demolished by previously "doing something" of the very same kind. They gaze out at a financial debacle rooted in various government policies that induced lenders to do business with millions of borrowers who had no realistic prospect of repaying the loans."
More ... (Source: LewRockwell.com)
____________________________________________________________________

More Economic Illiteracy from a Princeton Economist
"Not content to let Krugman be the only Apostle of Ignorance from Princeton, Alan Blinder has checked in with a 'wish list' for the "stimulus," and on the pages of the Wall Street Journal, no less. Indeed, I think we can rename this piece of economic illiteracy, 'The Blinder leading the Blind.'"
More ... (Source: The LRC Blog)

Related:

My Economic Wish List (Source: The Wall Street Journal)
____________________________________________________________________

Financial Crisis: The Failure of Accounting Reform
"In short, the greatest error of the accounting reform recently introduced worldwide is that it scraps centuries of accounting experience and business management when it replaces the prudence principle, as the highest ranking among all traditional accounting principles, with the "fair-value" principle, which is simply the introduction of the volatile market value for an entire set of assets, particularly financial assets."
More ... (Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute)

Books To Burn

American liberals have long been aggressively uninterested in the darker elements of their own tradition. A in-depth read of these books would make them interested again. Brown and Red socialism -- the national and international types -- had far more in common with each other, in their grim statism, than with liberal democratic capitalism. They were both organized around the principle that parliamentary democracy was a fraud -- that the working class, unable to grasp its own predicament, was best served by an elite that knew what was best for it.
The socialist pedigree that both authors display is important to understanding the kind of "liberal fascism" that made its way to America decades ago. American progressives -- including Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson -- Bismarck's Prussia was a lodestar: It featured a welfare-state apparatus and authoritarian control over society and culture. "Progressives," -- self-consciously borrowing the rhetoric of Marxists -- "did many things that we would today call objectively fascist, and fascists did many things they would today call objectively progressive."

We see in Ms. Klein's and Mr. Galbraith's impulse a presumptive right to ensure the overall well-being of the populace -- with intrusive and potentially dangerous results. Let us observe, at the beginning of the progressive state in the 1930s that Hugh Johnson, the head of FDR's ill-fated 1934 National Recovery Administration -- which proposed a corporatist solution to the ills of the Depression -- was an ardent admirer of Mussolini and hung a looming picture of Il Duce in his NRA office. Going back to the late 1920s, Herbert Croly of The New Republic, whose book "The Promise of American Life" was a founding document of modern statist liberalism, defended Mussolini by comparing fascist violence to the (implicitly justified) martial means by which Lincoln preserved the Union.
Croly was also something of a eugenicist, saying that the state needed to "interfere on behalf of the really fittest." And indeed, American liberalism once had a strong eugenicist strain. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was a close ally of the white supremacist Lothrop Stoddard, the author of "The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy." Eugenics was at the time the natural expression of the Progressives' public-health movement. Some authors note that it proved to be an inspiration for the Nazi Party.
In short, liberalism in America is an unstable mix of statist and collectivist tendencies. Sizable government, even in moderate forms, is always about to roll down a slippery slope or take the road to serfdom.
If lawmakers around the world take these books seriously it will lead to more folly and violence. Only deregulation, elimination of most taxation, and other Libertarian type policies will create a world of peace and plenty.

Avoiding Health-Care Chaos

"In reality, reform could crater for the same reasons it did in 1994: The leading Democratic plans include radical changes that would tax and disrupt the health care of millions. With a minimum price tag of $120 billion, universal health insurance coverage will require taxing the middle class during a recession, further expanding a $1 trillion deficit, or having the government deny medical care to patients. An estimated 30 million Americans would lose their current coverage under Barack Obama's plan. Millions could lose established relationships with their doctors."
More ... (Source: CATO Institute)

Related:

Obama Will Ration Your Health Care (Source: The Wall Street Journal)
Orszag's Health Warning (Source: The Wall Street Journal)
____________________________________________________________________

From 2005 to 2007, New York, New Jersey Counties Rank Highest in Property Tax on Homeowners; Louisiana Parishes Rank Lowest
"New data released today by the Census Bureau show that over a three-year period (2005, 2006 and 2007) average homeowners in New York and New Jersey counties paid the most in property taxes while those in Louisiana parishes paid the least."
More ... (Source: Tax Foundation)

Related:

New Jersey Is the Perfect Bad Example (Source: The Wall Street Journal)
____________________________________________________________________

2008 Pig Book Summary
"If Washington, D.C. were to export a commodity, it would be rhetoric. Politicians especially love to talk about fiscal responsibility. On March 13, 2008 the Senate had an opportunity to test that rhetoric when Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) offered an amendment to impose a one-year moratorium on earmarks. Pork beat talk as the measure failed by a vote of 29-71. ... The 2008 Congressional Pig Book Summary gives a snapshot of each appropriations bill and details the juciest projects culled from the complete Pig Book (.pdf)"
More ... (Source: Citizens Against Government Waste)
____________________________________________________________________

The End of the Global Warming Frenzy
"Alas, the indefatigable Christopher Booker suggests that 2008 may be the year that the global warming scare died. And here I was planning on summer in December. The alarmists aren’t yet ready to go away, but their ability to convince humankind to collectively jump off the economic cliff may be disappearing."
More ... (Source: OpenMarket.org)

Zardari And Uribe Have A Lot In Common

The challenges before Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari are strikingly similar to the problems Columbia faced (and in many regards still faces) before 2002: For decades, insurgents and paramilitary vigilante groups were killing and marauding throughout much of the countryside. The insurgents reject government authority on ideological grounds. There is also aggression from neighboring countries. The paramilitary groups operate within the government's law enforcement agencies and military units. There is wide-spread poverty and limited economic opportunities. Stifling government bureaucracy does not help.
In 2002, as the insurgent group, FARC, lobbed mortar rounds into the capital of Bogota, incoming Columbian President Alvaro Uribe was sworn into office. Uribe, who won on promises of cracking down on violence and poverty, was not deterred from this form of intimidation. The fact that the FARC was knocking at the front door of the nation's capital and controlled large swaths of the country-side was telling of the crisis Columbia faced. Roughly six years later, Uribe has FARC on the ropes and in control of little Columbian real estate. Often, Communist rebels have to seek sanctuary in Venezuela and Ecuador.
How did Uribe bring the FARC to its knees, ending violence and kidnappings, while stimulating the Columbian economy to new heights?
As President, he led a program of government he called the “Policy of Democratic Security.” During his presidency, the paramilitary groups agreed to follow a peace process and gave up their guns. Because of an increase in defense expenditures from a level of about 3.6% of GDP to 6% of GDP by 2006 the Communist guerrillas faced a renewed, better equipped Columbian military. May be most importantly Uribe spearheaded several Free Trade Agreements with different countries.
In an April 7, 2008 editorial in The Wall Street Journal, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wrote "Today, as war has given way to growing security, Colombians who once fled their homes in fear are returning by the thousands. Democratic institutions and the rule of law are growing stronger and more inclusive. Unemployment and poverty are at their lowest levels in over a decade and a growing economy is creating good jobs for Colombians in their own country. In short, Colombia is becoming a normal nation again."
Uribe, re-elected by a landslide in May 2006, has ended years of fruitless appeasement and is enforcing the law against both rebels and paramilitaries. He has also moved to demobilize illegal rural armies. The lives of ordinary Colombians have improved dramatically, and a safer business environment has helped to cut unemployment by at least 5 percentage points in the past five years. Uribe's next challenge is to reduce the burden of government so that the economy can grow faster. Currently, it is heavily dependent on exports of petroleum, coffee, and cut flowers. A pending trade agreement with the U.S., if approved, should encourage economic diversification and stimulate growth.
Half way around the world Pakistan's Zardari faces almost insurmountable problems. Like Uribe, violence marked Zardari's rise to power when religous fundamentalists or paramilitary units murdered his wife, the late Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, on Dec. 27, 2007.
Pakistan remains poor, and political risk deters most foreign investment. There is ongoing political unrest and terrorism, especially in provinces bordering Afghanistan. A likely hiding spot for Usama Bin Laden, the northwestern area of Pakistan is a hotbed of Islamist militants who are besieging the country. Also, for decades Pakistan was ruled by the military, especially the Inter-Services Intelligency (ISI) agency, which has ties to Islamist militants. Also, Zardari must deal with his powerful and aggitated neighbor, India, and must tread carefully after the Mumbai attacks.
However, in true Uribe fashion, security and economic liberalization are at the heart of his reforms. Zardari has promised to hunt down those responsible for the Mumbai attacks while discussing the posibility of arranging a free-trade zone between India and Pakistan in order to rev up the economy. He has even offered to withdraw Pakistan's first strike nuclear weapons doctrine against India. Also, Zardari has removed the political arm of the ISI in order to curb the spy agency's influence in domestic affairs.
Despite these efforts there is still much to do. Pakistan has weak trade freedom, investment freedom, financial freedom, property rights, and freedom from corruption. Imports are subject to a high average tariff rate and burdensome non-tariff barriers. The judicial system does not protect property rights effectively because of a serious case backlog, understaffed facilities, and poor security. Serious corruption taints the judiciary and civil service, making Pakistan one of the most corrupt nations in the world. Pakistan's financial market, though advanced for the region, is constrained by regulation and bureaucracy.
The world awaits to see if Pakistan can make a Columbian-like turnaround.