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The Joint Committee on Taxation found that raising the tax on millionaires to 30% federal (the so-called Buffet Rule) would raise just $5 billion per year.

Worse, if the Democrats passed all of their tax increase wish list – Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation concluded the best case scenario (if no one changes their behaviour) – would raise $82 billion…..or just 7% of the current deficit.

In short there is simply no possibility that the Fiscal Cliff will be solved without MASSIVE spending cuts. Don’t tell that to an Obama worshipper like CNN’s Candy Crowley though, as the math simply does’t fit her fantasy….. as she proved on Sunday’s State of the Union when she pitched Tax Hikes Without Even Mentioning Spending Cuts.

It’s not just millionaires and billionaires who are fleeing the economic madness in California. Even cows are starting to depart for greener pastures. That’s right, 400 bovine refugees shuffled off to Kansas just this month, with more expected to follow as over 100 dairy farms in California close their doors.

Why are cows voting with their hooves?

It’s hard to find a government program as insane as the complex web of price supports, market orders, direct payments, diversion programs, herd reductions, import barriers, export subsidies, and stacked-to-the-rafters cheese warehouses that characterize Uncle Sam’s efforts to “rationally manage” the dairy market. If you really want to understand how crony capitalism works to create market conditions only a Soviet commissar could love, take a look at what happens when byzantine federal regulations collide with state interventions.

Around the time of the New Deal, guaranteeing the milk supply joined life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as one of the cardinal responsibilities of government. While this may be ascribed to a desire by politicians to always have enough babies to kiss, some suspect that buying the votes of dairy farmers had something to do with it.

And so, while presidents come and go and Congress regularly passes reform bills to correct distortions caused by prior reforms, dairy programs enjoy the closest thing to perpetual life that a lobbyist could hope for. The main task of these programs is to make sure that market forces will never be allowed to balance supply and demand.

To ensure the public good, the federal government and some states set a minimum legal price on milk. Selling milk for less can actually land you in jail. While this doesn’t sound like such a good deal for consumers or innovative producers, it’s great for well-connected dairy farmers and the politicians they support.

Artificially high prices impose a tax on anybody who drinks milk or eats cheese and other dairy products. Estimates put the cost to consumers as high as $5 billion a year. But since this tax is hidden, legislators get to enjoy the gratitude of dairy farmers without having to face the wrath of consumers, who remain in the dark about how much they are individually paying.

Our nation’s 65,000 dairy farms have been producing a chronic oversupply of milk for as long as the government has taken an interest in their product. While 65,000 dairy farms sounds like a lot for a market that can’t gag down all the milk modern hormone-boosted cows produce, things used to be even worse. There were once 200,000 dairy farms producing an oversupply of milk, at one point filling government cheese warehouses with $4 billion dollars of uneaten inventory.

Ever wondered where government cheese came from?

If milk can’t find buyers at artificially inflated prices, the government buys the excess with our tax dollars and turns it into cheese. But we aren’t allowed to eat the cheese we paid for as this would be unfair to commercial cheese makers. So the cheese sits in storage until it either rots or can be quietly given away to the poor, both at home and abroad.

The crisis in California stems from Golden State cheese makers carrying more political clout than dairy farmers. As a result, the minimum legal price of milk in California is 2 ½ cents per pound less than the average minimum legal price in other states. Two and a half cents may not sound like much, but in a business in chronic oversupply, that’s larger than typical profit margins.

With feedstock costs skyrocketing due to the diversion of corn to make subsidized ethanol-another brilliantly managed business- California dairy farmers are on the ropes. Meanwhile, California cheese makers enjoy a competitive advantage because it is illegal for out-of-state cheese makers to buy cheaper California milk.

In desperation, instead of shipping the excess milk out of state, California dairy farms are shutting down and shipping their cows to states with higher minimum prices, allowing them to contribute to the glut there. This has caused California milk lobbyists to scream bloody murder, demanding that California bring its minimum prices in line with other states. Cheese lobbyists just smile, knowing that they have more legislators in their pockets and can afford to sit tight. That’s just how central planning works.

A few years ago, the Office of Management and Budget assessed federal dairy price support programs as part of a broad initiative to gauge the effectiveness of over 1,000 government programs. It found that the dairy program had not demonstrated results, has design flaws that limit its effectiveness, and distorts trade in a way that puts the U.S. in violation of World Trade Organization rules.

What action was taken as a result of this negative report? None, of course. If you go to ExpectMore.gov to read the program assessment, a note pops up that says, “This is historical material, ‘frozen in time.’ The web site is no longer updated and links to external web sites and some internal pages will not work.” That’s just how special-interest democracy works.

So bon voyage, intrepid cows. Yet another trillion-dollar farm bill is being cobbled together in Washington as we speak. And the odds that any deficit producing, wealth-destroying, consumer-shafting dairy programs will be phased out, allowing the dairy industry to restructure itself on rational lines, are about as good as that of the Supreme Court waking up one morning and ruling that the Constitution never granted Congress the power to set milk prices in the first place.

Bill Frezza is a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and a Boston-based venture capitalist. He can be reached at bill@vereverus.com. If you would like to have his weekly columns delivered to you by e-mail, click here or follow him on Twitter @BillFrezza.

Michael finds some staggeringly “Goofy” behavior when he takes his long term look at a one specific Major Movement and Trend….. the Bear Market in Government.

{mp3}mtnov17goofy{/mp3}

The Real Housewives of Benghazi

Just a week after the re-election of Barack Hussein Obama II as, unaccountably, president of the United States, the full extent of the looming disaster is beginning to dawn on the American people. Forget the looming fiscal cliff, the Senate majority leader’s irresponsible decision to exclude the soon-to-be-bankrupt Social Security system from any budget agreement, the retention of the corrupt Eric Holder as attorney general, or the bruited nominations of the inept Susan Rice as secretary of State, the arrogant John Kerry as secretary of Defense, and the incompetent John Brennan as the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Those things, if they come to pass, will cause us plenty of heartburn down the road to Alinskyite serfdom.

For now, though, simply consider the state of the U.S. military, whose moral collapse was signaled by the surprise resignation of CIA director David Petraeus last week as details of his affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, slowly became public — a scandal that quickly ensnared Gen. John Allen, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and another woman, Jill Kelley. By now, you’ve read most of the salacious details of this French bedroom farce, which would be funny if it weren’t so serious — with one door at Centcom after another flying open to reveal lissome bare-limbed married ladies and half-uniformed generals scrambling to get their pants on as the press explodes in orgiastic satisfaction. With its mission accomplished — getting Hussein re-elected and condemning America to four more years of potentially fatal economic disaster, foreign policy malevolence, and domestic fascism in the form of Obamacare, bureaucratic regulation, and executive orders, the media is only too happy to start poking around in the bedrooms of the soon-to-be-formerly famous and powerful.

It’s richly ironic that after celebrating a Democratic Party campaign that was almost entirely based on explicit appeals to female sexuality, including free birth control and the abortion of the inconvenient as a constitutional right, the media now finds itself back in the drag of Tom Wolfe’s Victorian Gentleman, prudishly cluck-clucking over the remarkable fact that when institutional barriers between men and women break down — barriers erected not out of sexist animus or irrational prejudice, but in recognition of the biological reality of boy meets girl — all sorts of things start to happen. Including rampant sexual activity from the top down; as David French observes here:

In the military — as elsewhere — sexual scandal is simply called “drama,” and “drama” (with its related fights, substance abuse, and sometimes even suicide attempts) can dominate military justice in deployed environments. During my deployment, I was with an all-male combat arms unit on a small, isolated base and thus missed most of the controversy that sometimes consumed entire units. But go to Balad — or one of the other larger bases — and it was everywhere. The larger DFACs (dining facilities) were the deployed equivalent of singles bars, and the omnipresent port-o-pot was a favorite location for clandestine couplings.

Whoever decided that “women’s liberation” required the sexual integration of the armed forces did his or her country a signal disservice.

…..read page 2 HERE

 

 

Second-Term Curse

Posted by Victor Davis Hanson

on Thursday, 15 November 2012 17:59

Oh, We Forgot to Tell You…….Hushed-up “news” explodes with a fury.pic giant 111512 A

The second-term curse goes like this: A president (e.g., Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and so on) wins reelection, but then his presidency implodes over the next four years — mired in scandals or disasters such as Watergate, Iran-Contra, Monica Lewinsky, the Iraqi insurgency, and Hurricane Katrina.

Apparently, like tragic Greek heroes, administrations grow arrogant after their reelection wins. They believe that they are invincible and that their public approval is permanent rather than fickle.

The result is that Nemesis zeroes in on their fatal conceit and with a boom corrects their hubris. Or is the problem in some instances simply that embarrassments and scandals, hushed up in fear that they might cost an administration an election, explode with a fury in the second term?

Coincidentally, right after the election we heard that Iran had attacked a U.S. drone in international waters.

Coincidentally, we just learned that new food-stamp numbers were “delayed” and that millions more became new recipients in the months before the election.

…..many more coincidences HERE

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