The economic troubles in Europe are leading to public unrest, as EU governments try to pare back their bloated public sectors, in some cases trimming wages and benefits, in others by delaying access to them. In France, plans to save the national pension system by raising the retirement age from 60 (!) to just 62 has lead to a massive strike of over one million people:
So, let’s see. In 2009 President Obama asked for and got a pork fiesta $787 billion stimulus package from Congress, saying we needed it to keep unemployment from rising above 8% and to put America back to work.
A quick scan of the headlines this morning:
From (oddly enough) IWantYourMoney.net, a trailer for their forthcoming documentary on government spending and the role of the federal government. Trust me, it’s much more entertaining than it sounds:
While we rightly agree to abide by the decisions of the Supreme Court as the final arbiter of what is and isn’t constitutional (barring changes via amendment), that doesn’t mean all its decisions are correct, or that its errors are without consequence. Among the more famous errors of the Court, consider Dred Scott v Sandford, which upheld fugitive slave laws; Plessy v Ferguson, which upheld segregation in state law; Buck v Bell, which upheld state laws mandating forced sterilizations; Korematsu v United States, which permitted the forced internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII; and the recent Kelo v City of New London, which made a mockery of the 5th Amendment’s takings clause.
In an earlier post, I had described the deliberate sacrifice of 23,000 jobs in the Gulf region as a necessary part of President Obama’s economic amateurism: unfamiliar with how business operates in the real world, he was willing to eliminate the livelihoods of thousands in the magical belief that they would all come back as soon as he allowed drilling to resume.
