Tuesday, July 19, 2011

A Balanced Budget Amendment

A Balanced Budget Amendment




Spending is out of control, and some people are proposing a Constitutional amendment to force lawmakers to close the gap.  There is a lot of debate about the wisdom, legality, or efficacy of such an amendment, but in simple terms, they are a waste of time as currently proposed.

A Constitutional amendment will do no good as long as the incentives remain in place for lawmakers to spend more.  No matter how carefully crafted, the ingenious minds of the future will find ways to circumvent the rules.  It happens today with off balance sheet expenditures, moving expenses into previous fiscal years, monkeying with all sorts of devices to hide the true extent of the spending.

So the incentives must be removed.   Deficit spending must extract a large personal cost from the lawmakers, one that exceeds the vast benefits they get through spending like drunken sailors.

What do politicians seek by spending?  Power.  They wish to remain in power.

In order for them to have spending restraint, they must feel the pain  -- and that pain must be severe.

Therefore, I propose the following Amendment:

"All revenues and expenditures of the Federal Government will be included in the budget.  Congress shall not spend more in a fiscal year than has been received in revenue.  In the event of a national emergency, Congress may borrow funds and spend more than has been received. 30 days after borrowing is approved during a national emergency, The President and all members of Congress are removed from office and barred from re-election to any office until the debt incurred during the crisis is fully retired. The Vice President shall assume the office of the President, and a special election shall be held  for Congress." 


In this way we can allow the Federal Government to respond to real emergencies, but at a direct and personal cost to the politicians.

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

All Government programs have the opposite effect, you just watch...

I have the premise that all government programs have the opposite of the intended effect, and I will publish a more detailed post on that later.

But for the moment, bear with me for the following example.



The Federal Government is now putting graphic pictures of diseased organs on packs of cigarettes in order to reduce smoking.   This will, of course, increase the number of people smoking.

How?, you ask?

Easy.  Smoking is at all time lows, and the campaign over the past 20 years to reduce smoking has gotten key stats on smoking to all time lows. 

Now that the government is trying to gross people out on smoking, it will backfire on them.

Adult smokers will simply ignore them, or buy covers for the packs of cigarettes that will render the pictures useless.

But kids and teens will be fascinated.  What teenage boy is not fascinated by the gross and icky?  How many teens will be drawn to the packs just to get a 'eeewww gross!' reaction from their peers?

The Feds are planning to rotate the pictures to reduce the chance that people begin to ignore them.   What do you want to bet that people start collecting the various packs? 

You watch.  3 years from now the study will come out.  Teen smoking will rebound to higher levels shortly after this new law goes into effect.

Global Warming causes......Cooling!


 Global Warming causes......COOLING!!!





We have done a number of posts on the fact that the Global Warming people are completely making this stuff up, and that they are claiming that everything that happens is a result of Global Warming.



But we now have the ultimate in Global Warming hooey:

China coal surge held back warming: study

By Shaun Tandon (AFP)
July 5, 2011
WASHINGTON — China’s soaring coal consumption in the last decade held back global warming as sulfur emissions served as a coolant, according to a study that takes head-on a key argument of climate skeptics.

While 2005 and 2010 are tied as the hottest years on record, skeptics have charged that an absence of a steady rise from 1998 to 2008 disproves the view that people are heating up the planet through greenhouse gas emissions.

Robert Kaufmann, a professor at Boston University, said he was motivated to conduct the study after a skeptic confronted him at a public forum, telling him he had seen on Fox News that temperatures had not risen over the decade.

"Nothing that I had read that other people have done gave me a quick answer to explain that seeming contradiction, because I knew that carbon dioxide concentrations have risen," Kaufmann told AFP.

The US-Finnish study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, named a culprit — coal.

The burning of coal jumped in the past decade, particularly in China, whose economy has grown at breakneck pace. Coal emits sulfur, which stops the Sun’s rays from reaching the Earth


So now we see that the truth has finally emerged: Burning coal causes Global Warming by emitting gases, and it prevents global warming by emitting gases.

If this is true, then we should immediately start burning more coal, not less, as the left has been demanding.

None of this passes the basic smell test of valid science.

Basic science requires that a theory be dis-provable.  That is, you must be able to design an experiment that will prove the theory false.  If you cannot, then it is not a valid theory.

Global Warming cannot be falsified.  It causes rain and not rain.  It causes warmer temperatures and colder temperatures.  It causes every known weather phenomenon, and every weather event proves AGW is true.

This is obviously complete tomfoolery, and a massive fraud on humanity.