Merging the men and women into a single force with equal duties would save a lot of money. Why not?

Notice that I am not taking a position. I’m only asking the questions that others don’t have the guts to ask. I leave it to other to come up with the answers. It’s been a long time since I was a marine. Maybe everyone showers in private now. But let’s stop acting like this is some kind of discrimination issue and look at it realistically.

Bob

Why has the cost of healthcare gone through the roof? Nobody wants to address that fundamental question. Instead they treat it as a given and only discuss who should pay the bill.

That doesn’t make sense to me. What do you think?

Our hypothetical donor would no longer have the option of getting 35% off on a $10,000 gift so the proper comparison would be based on 28%. By reducing the gift to $9000 the donor would lose a $280 tax credit and therefore have $720 more to spend himself (or herself).

This proves that Feldstein is even more incompetent than you thought (or, at the very least, a really bad writer).

The real argument against Obama’s proposal is that it is extremely unfair. Money donated is not part of spendable income and should not be taxed. I think most Americans would agree with that formulation.

As a practical matter I look back on my youth when I could freely visit museums, zoos without any cost. If I had to pay admission my education would have suffered greatly. Those great institutions were supported by philanthropy. Now they are protected by gates and those who need them the most (the poor and disadvantaged) are no longer welcome.

Bob

Eugene Robinson’s arguments are full of holes.

Ad hominem argumentation seems to be his forte. Because the Senate didn’t cough up the funds the Republican White House demanded, he holds that they are suicidal lunatics (and he equates that with Republicans and “free-market fundamentalists).

Republicans in states with foreign car assembly plants are trying to scuttle the handout to strengthen their political position, while Republicans in other states are acting to weaken the party in those areas. Come on, now. Does this argument make any sense at all?

For Robinson, “renegotiating labor contracts qualifies as meddling.” But pumping our grandchildren’s assets to moribund automakers is not? Or, if it is then why is one type of meddling OK and another is not? Very inconsistent, Mr. Robinson.

He also doesn’t seem to know or acknowledge that the “housing bubble” was created by a government focused on keeping the votes of homeowners and the real estate industry. You could call that a pre-bailout.

And forget about the loan fantasy. If the automakers had good prospects, there are always investors looking for growth. It is precisely because the prospects of the auto industry are very bad that they are looking for a government handout.

I imagine similar arguments could have been made to bail out companies like US Steel or numberless garment and shoe manufacturers. We have also lost our piano industry and countless others. Where would you draw the line?

By the way, Robinson’s piece does not seem to be an op-ed. His Washington Post email address suggests that he is a staffer.

Robert

You properly object to the bailout of the financial industry, but seem ready to support the same for an automobile industry that can’t seem to produce vehicles that Americans want to drive. I wonder how much you are willing to donate from your personal assets to the Detroit automakers?

I suspect that the answer is “little to none.” What gives you (or anyone else) the right to give away money that does not belong to you. Any and all of these corporate welfare programs are giving away the not-yet-earned assets of the not yet born.

You are old enough to remember the claim that we don’t have to worry about the national debt because we owe it to ourselves. Well, now we owe it to China among others and are getting deeper in the hole every year.

Anyway, if the culprit is the banks alone, why aren’t the foreign makers feeling the pinch as much as our own carmakers? The Japanese economy hit the skids in the early 1990s and is yet to completely recover.

And how does the outrageous payments to the financial sector justify similar treatment to other areas of the economy? Many are wondering when it will be their turn to receive a handout. It’s bad enough to exist on handouts. But handouts from government which produces nothing must inevitable be ripped off from honest, hardworking citizens.

You are quick to realize that the financial beggars produce nothing, why can’t you see that is even truer of the government that is dishing out what is looted from taxpayers?

I wouldn’t be so quick to blame car maker’s and dealer’s troubles on the financial climate. If it were true (and I don’t believe it for a minute), the financial bailout would be a boon to the auto industry. As for lack of inventory financing. I live in a rather depressed area and the car lots are full of cars, so I don’t think these guys are looking to add inventory.

The fact is that American auto makers are slow learners. Why? I don’t know.

Bob

PS I’ve been waiting for your reply to my last post. I am interested in hearing what you have to say.

In the article he refers to the book Economics in One Lesson, a short, but elegant explanation of the subject written many years ago by Henry Hazlitt. He also references works by Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. I knew Murray in the 70s and he was justifiably regarded as the leading exponent of Austrian economics, the laissez-faire school that you have a low regard for.

If you want to criticize laissez faire on the basis of George W. Bush’s policies (or even Ronald Reagan’s) you are engaged in straw man argumentation. Advocating a free market does not mean an endorsement of fraud or deception. What we are experiencing today is far from the workings of a free market. Instead it bears an ominous resemblance to too the economic policies of Mussolini which were known as fascism long before that term took on its ominous post Holocaust meaning. Mussolini’s fascism, later adopted by Hitler involves a close partnership between corporation and state. This is what we are seeing in America today and this is not the workings of a free market.

In a truly free market individuals would be free to conduct their olives and their businesses any way they chose as long as they respected the rights of others to do the same. In a truly free society, lying, cheating, and stealing are illegal and treated as such. If a business made bad decisions it would fail; there would be no government bailout option. This too is cause and effect.

I don’t know how long you have been looking at the economic health of the nation, but there has been a lot of bull thrown around for a very long time. I remember when we began to lose our industrial base and the rationalizers said that we were maturing
into an information based economy. We would be doing all the creative brainwork while those low-paid Asians would take care of the grunt work. Sure.

How could anyone believe that for a minute when those same Asians were graduating from American colleges at the top of their class? Then we found out that Indian programmers could replace Americans at much lower cost. Surprise!
Meanwhile America became the greatest debtor nation in the history of the Earth and China, once our arch enemy, is now holding all the cards.

Then came 9/11 and since then people incapable of objective thought have been parroting that ridiculous refrain, “Everything changed after 9/11.” That may be true but not for the reasons given. Shortly after the World Trade Center fell, President Bush uttered one of the most absurd sentences I have ever heard, “They hate us for our freedom.”

Ever since then Bush and company have been dismantling that freedom with all possible speed. Goodbye to habeas corpus. Abuse airline passengers. Abandon posse comitatus. Scrap the Bill of Rights.

While writing this post I happened to find the following sentence in an article on the Homeland Security website,

“Through a gradual erosion of the act’s prohibitions over the past 20 years, posse comitatus today is more of a procedural formality than an actual impediment to the use of U.S. military forces in homeland defense.”
We may not be far from seeing streets patrolled by soldiers with automatic weapons demanding to see our “papers”

You speak of “ideology” which is an interesting word. I believe in cause and effect. I also believe in individual rights which include property rights as well as freedom to think and believe as you wish. Pragmatism is an enemy of these principles. A pragmatist can say that freedom is nice, but hey there are terrorists out there. If you fall for that line, the terrorists have won. On the other hand, what right do we have to invade other countries that have not threatened us.

Take Afghanistan. We were attacked by Osama bin Laden who was holed up in the Afghan mountains. Did we send in the 10th Mountain Division to wipe him out. We did not. Instead we attacked the Taliban who we had recognized prior to 9/11 as the legitimate government of the country. Now I don’t like the Taliban’s philosophy (ideology, if you prefer), but we cannot wipe out every less than utopian government on the planet. In fact we should start by working on our own.

Then we invaded Iraq and justified the invasion with the most blatant lies. Any moron could see that the country was an artificial union of three groups that didn’t like each other very much. That union was created by the British and held together by a tyrant. Did we stop to think that without the tyrant, things would come apart? Did we plan to replace the tyrant? Were we prepared to accept the division of the country? No. No. No.

And, of course there was no threat.

I too am working for kosen rufu, but at the same time we need to be aware of the growing threats to our freedoms and our prosperity. Josei Toda may have attained enlightenment in prison, but how much better it could have been if the Japanese people could have seen the evil of the path that the militarists were taken?