There is Hope for Arizona

Thursday, February 12, 2009

No earmarks in Porkulus, eh?

"Dingy" Harry Reid is telling his constituents that he has secured Porkulus money for a LA-2-LasVegas high-speed gambling train.

In 1997, Amtrak had a similar route. It failed

A private company is currently building such a route using private money.

Reid will kill off this private effort. I believe this shows that he's a dirty player.

This information comes from the Senate Conservative Fund which is chaired by US Senator Jim DeMint.

Here is the link to the story:

Just two days after President Obama told the American people the economic stimulus bill will have "no earmarks", the Associated Press reports that Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nevada) is telling his constituents in Nevada that he has personally worked out a deal as part of the House-Senate conference committee to get them money for a high-speed gambling train.

In late-stage talks, Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., pressed for $8 billion to construct high-speed rail lines, quadrupling the amount in the bill that passed the Senate on Tuesday. Reid's office issued a statement noting that a proposed Los Angeles-to-Las Vegas rail might get a big chunk of the money.

This of course exposes the little game the President is playing with the public. He tells everyone there are no earmarks in the bill but then turns around and either (a) gives the money to the states, which he knows will fund the earmarks, or (b) instructs his agencies to fund the earmarks directly. It's all very clever, if not deceptive.

Reid's high-speed gambling train not only violates the President's guiding principles for this bill, it also violates American taxpayers.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

How then would Adam Smith fix the present mess?

Sorry, but it is fixed already. The answer to a decline in the value of speculative assets is to pay less for them. Job done.

We could pump the banks full of our national treasure. But Smith said: "To attempt to increase the wealth of any country, either by introducing or by detaining in it an unnecessary quantity of gold and silver, is as absurd as it would be to attempt to increase the good cheer of private families, by obliging them to keep an unnecessary number of kitchen utensils." [Page 440, The Wealth of Nations]

The writer, P.J. O'Rouke, is a contributing editor at The Weekly Standard and is the author, most recently, of On The Wealth of Nations, Books That Changed the World, published by Atlantic Books, 2007

Read the full Financial Times article

It's not that complicated, "Economics in One Lesson" (1946)

If this paragraph had been written yesterday, one would admire it as a remarkably precise explanation of recent events. But the truth is much more impressive: it is from a book first published in 1946, Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson --

"Government-guaranteed home mortgages, especially when a negligible down payment or no down payment whatever is required, inevitably mean more bad loans than otherwise. They force the general taxpayer to subsidize the bad risks and to defray the losses. They encourage people to "buy" houses that they cannot really afford. They tend eventually to bring about an oversupply of houses as compared with other things. They temporarily overstimulate building, raise the cost of building for everybody (including the buyers of the homes with the guaranteed mortgages), and may mislead the building industry into an eventually costly overexpansion. In brief, in they long run they do not increase overall national production but encourage malinvestment."

Thanks to the Ayn Rand Center for posting the above information.