The Loudest Cricket

The trouble with Ponzi entitlement schemes is that you eventually run out of people to support the ever growing pyramid.  The automakers have hundreds of thousands of retirees collecting pensions and medical benefits while employing only a quarter of that number.  And now, state and local governments are running into the same problem.  Detroit has about 20,000 retirees collecting benefits with 13,000 current employees.  Oakland County wised up years ago and has put new hires into 401(k)-style retirement plans.  This should be the model for any pension program, including Social Security.

Kwame is probably headed back to prison.  The guy still thinks he’s above the law and is forcing the city to spend time and money it doesn’t have.  At least Monica wised up and is about to be sentenced to what looks to be substantial jail time.

Second, the central tenet of American political philosophy is that government is instituted not to bestow rights but to protect pre-existing rights.

A tenet our elected officials and much of the population has forgotten.  It doesn’t take much digging to find what the Founders and Framers meant by the second amendment:

No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government. – Thomas Jefferson

Americans have the right and advantage of being armed – unlike the citizens of other countries whose governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. – James Madison

Firearms stand next in importance to the Constitution itself. They are the American people’s liberty teeth and keystone under independence. – George Washington

They knew that in order to protect liberty, the population would have to be armed.  Once that right is taken away, there is no stopping tyranny.  What’s so hard to understand about “the right of people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed?”

Massachusetts may have the Kennedy clan, but here in Michigan we have the Levins.  Carl has been a Senator for about 40 years and his brother Sander, now chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, has been a Representative for 28 years.

Levin’s a classic liberal, and one of Congress’ most ardent opponents of free trade pacts.

That should tell you all you need to know.  The News is dreaming if it thinks that Sander’s recent appointment will help Michigan.  What have the Levins done for the state over the last several decades?  Not much.  We really need term limits.

While I’m certain that the EPA overstepped its bounds by claiming it had the right to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, I’m not even sure if Congress has that right.  At least, I can’t find the article, section, or amendment in the Constitution that gives Congress the power to regulate any emissions.  But maybe I have an outdated copy of the Constitution.

We have the ability to demand that lawmakers do more to ensure that good-paying jobs are created here in the United States.

Or we can sit back and watch the lion’s share of these jobs — which will provide content for cars sold in the United States — go to foreign workers.

Well, Ron, maybe if UAW members weren’t paid an average base salary of six-figures a year, then we would be able to keep more jobs in the US.  Why pay a union worker $55 an hour when someone else is willing to do the job for half that price?

State officials too long have ignored the fact that government is living beyond its means. It’s time to change that.

Good advice, but it will fall on deaf ears in Lansing, especially Granholm, whose latest budget is just another set of one-time fixes that won’t reform the Michigan budget.  She’s waiting for someone else – the feds – to save the day with a bailout, a common Democratic strategy.

It’s not the lack of intuition that makes Obama a bad president, but his lack of experience which leaves him woefully under-qualified to be leader greatest economic and military power in the world.  I suppose one could argue that intuition comes with experience.  Of course, experience is meaningless if one doesn’t learn from the past.

After last week’s resounding defeat of a property tax hike on Troy homeowners, the city council and mayor must now decide what action to take to balance the budget.  I spent about five minutes looking over the budget documents and have a couple of questions and recommendations.  First, you tried to scare people into the voting for the millage by threatening to layoff cops claiming that tax revenues plummeted and yet the drop looks to be only about $1 million over two years, or about 2% and yet expenditures went up about $16 million over that same time period (page 8 of the PDF).  Why such a large discrepancy?  Next, I noticed that the second (!) city-owned golf course will cost about $2 million (page 10) to operate in 2010 and only bring in around $1.2 million (page 9).  It probably has never made a profit.  Any privately owned course would be out of business, so why should the residents of Troy subsidize golfers?  Sell the course or shut it down – that’s $2 million off the books.  I’m sure if I spent more time, I’d be able to find other saving, but isn’t that the job of the council, mayor, and manager?

While the rest of us suffer during The Great Recession, state union workers are expected to get a 3 percent pay raise this year.  Unless the state legislature steps in, which they should.  But will Granholm agree?  Doubtful, since she is the one that negotiated the scheduled increase with the unions and she’s the lamest duck in the nation.  She claims that state workers already have sacrificed $650 million in unpaid days off and higher health insurance premiums.  And yet the state survived.  Maybe some of those workers need 365 unpaid days off.