Spending Insanely While the Economy Collapses

By Alan Caruba

America is a sovereign nation, a constitutional Republic that will celebrate the 235th anniversary of its declaration of independence in 1776 and the 223rd anniversary of its Constitution which became effective when the State of New Hampshire became the ninth State to ratify it in 1788.

By most indications it is a nation in its death throes. Its original values and virtues are being jettisoned and that is always a sign of internal rot. The passage of a law legalizing gay, same-sex marriage in New York State is just one example. It becomes the sixth State to do so.

Families are regarded as the keystone to a healthy society. When they begin to disintegrate or are redefined as same-sex, most observers conclude that a range of social problems will ensue.

The Census Bureau recently announced that married couples no longer head a majority of families in the United States. They now represent only 48% of households, based on data from the 2010 census. It is the first time this has ever occurred.

The 2008-2009 financial crisis was a wake-up call. The nation has been through such crises in the past including the Great Depression from 1929 until the start of World War Two in 1941. The present administration, Congress, and Federal Reserve has responded in much the same way it did in the past and, not surprisingly, the economy has not responded to a flood of “quantitative easing”, governmental make-work programs, and similar efforts.

As Ronald Reagan told us, government is not the answer, government is the problem.

Let me share just a few examples of what is so terribly wrong.

The U.S. Department of Transportation cancelled a $1.2 million federal highway program that would have sent employees on a 17-day globe-trotting journey “to photograph different billboards” after ABC News told the Department it planned to air a report on it. The program has been around for a decade, allegedly to study how other countries handle their major highway networks, motorcycle safety, managing pavement, and “adapting to climate change.”

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development recently announced the awarding of $26.7 million in “sweat equity” grants to produce at least 1,500 affordable homes for low-income individuals and families. Grants were made at a time when there is an abundance of homes in the marketplace that have been emptied by foreclosure or the decision to walk away from them because the mortgage costs more than the decreased value of the home. A total of four cities received these grants. This same department handed out more than $31 million in grants to public housing authorities, resident associations, and non-profit organizations. It appears to be a lame effort to keep people on payrolls at a time of growing unemployment.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is giving $60 million in the form of $20 million each to three public universities in Florida, Iowa, and Idaho (the first two States have political importance in the forthcoming election) as a “major scientific investment in studying the effects of climate change on agriculture and forest production.”

Climate change is the new way of describing “global warming.” At a time when an estimated 14 million Americans are out of work, the USDA is enriching professors of tree physiology and claiming that climate change will increase levels of food contamination “from chemicals” such as the ones used to actually grow crops and protect them against weeds and insect depredation.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, through its Forest Service Awards, has also given away nearly $3 million for “renewable energy projects” at the same time the administration has tapped the Strategic Oil Reserve—intended for use only for emergencies such as Hurricane Katrina—in a lame effort to lower prices at the gas pump. Secretary Tom Vilsack claimed that “Biomass is a vital part of America’s clean energy future” while Congress was voting to discontinue subsidies to ethanol producers that were costing Americans billions.

These are just three government departments that are giving away millions for useless, politically-motivated, grants and programs that drain the public treasury. The news, however, gets worse.

Wayne Crews, a vice president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, is an expert on the impact of federal government regulation of business and industry. He recently noted that the federal government “is on track to spend more than $3.5 trillion this year. What most people don’t know is that government costs about fifty percent more than what it spends. That’s because complying with federal regulations costs an addition $1.75 trillion—nearly an eighth of GDP. And almost none of that cost appears on the budget.”

“At the end of 2009, the Code of Federal Regulations was 157,974 pages long. In 2010, 3,752 new rules hit the books—equivalent to a new regulation coming into effect every 2 hours and 20 minutes, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.”

While Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke was telling reporters he had no idea why the economy was stalled, growing at an appalling rate of just over 1 percent annually, the government was continuing to throw money away in the name of climate change, a green economy, and countless other giveaway programs labeled “discretionary spending.”

The author, Ayn Rand, warned that, “When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion—when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing—when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors—when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you—when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice—you may know that your society is doomed.”

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Is Anything Secret Anymore? Depends on Whose Secrets!

By Alan Caruba

The one thing that the pundicracy---the columnists, former government and other folk who express themselves in print and broadcast media---have missed about the latest WikiLeaks outrage is that, like the earlier one regarding Afghan military operations, both have been directed solely at the United States of America.

Are we really surprised that the Saudis want the United States to bomb the hell out of Iran’s nuclear facilities? Is it some kind of revelation that many leaders of many nations cordially dislike one another?

After growing tired of paying bribes to the Barbary pirates, Thomas Jefferson commissioned our first naval warships and sent in the U.S. Marines. Today we have two carrier groups off the coast of North and South Korea. As the French say, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose—the more things change, the more they stay the same.

It is instructive that Julian Assange, the face for WikiLeaks, has not hacked into and exposed the secret files of Russia, China, North Korea, or comparable nations that are unfriendly to American interests and policies.

The reason, simply stated, is that Assange knows we would be talking about him in the past tense if he had.


We have been told that these revelations have materially affected our relations with other nations, but it would be a good idea to keep in mind that they, too, have their phalanxes of spies and analysts who examine everything that is said and done by America, diplomatically, militarily, economically, and politically.

They are the counterparts of our Central Intelligence Agency that essentially does the same thing. These functions are also carried out by the Pentagon and the Department of State. Intelligence is the currency of national survival. Other U.S. agencies keep track of crop statistics, maritime activity, and just about anything and everything else that can be measured.

That said, we were absolutely astonished to learn that North Korea was so advanced in its production of nuclear weapons and missiles. We had no idea that Saddam Hussein had not stockpiled weapons of mass destruction, despite widely believed, but flawed intelligence. Et cetera. Et cetera.

The great revelation of 9/11 was that the U.S. generated tons of intelligence, much of which was, in spycraft terminology, “stove piped”; isolated within an agency and not shared. In the effort to make that intelligence more available to more people within our vast government, WikiLeaks found a way into it.

One of those ways was an openly gay Private First Class in the U.S. Army who, in less politically correct times, would never had been inducted or permitted to serve.

All intelligence is vulnerable to spies and turncoats. When it is stored digitally, it becomes even more vulnerable and that is the downside of the most extraordinary technology ever invented by man.

It is one thing to deliberately hack into it—something the People’s Republic of China, the Russians, and others try to do on a daily basis—but it is quite another to make it available to anyone who wants to look at it and I do mean anyone.

All of which brings us back to Julian Assange, a rather pathetic individual who would otherwise be ignored except for his “talent” for hacking other people’s computer data. Somewhere along the way Julian developed a deep animus for the United States of America.

No doubt he and others see America as the modern version of the Roman Empire, but Julian is likely unaware of the success of the Roman Empire, a republic that lasted some five hundred years. Indeed, Romans were always reluctant to go to war unless either attacked or, as was frequently the case, invited to offer the protection of Pax Romana.

There is only one nation on planet Earth to which small nations and large can turn for protection against the aggression, real or anticipated, of the current rogue’s gallery of despots and lunatics that threaten peace in the Middle East, those nations on the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, nations bordering the Sea of Japan, and the Somali Peninsula, to name just a few places.

When and if the Swedes get through prosecuting Julian for alleged sexual crimes, the United States should reach out and bring him here for the crime of espionage. After which he should be subjected to a firing squad as an object lesson to others.

The most curious aspect of the WikiLeaks crimes is the failure of the Obama administration’s Department of Justice to take any action whatsoever. We are either witnessing that most inept DOJ in the history of the nation or one shot through with people who might actually sympathize with Julian Assange.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Cutting It Down to Size

The Good Old Days

By Alan Caruba

It started with a haircut in the morning. I sat in a barber chair I had sat in initially around the age of five. In those days, the 1940s, four Italian gentlemen cut hair and it cost 25 cents for a kid and $1.25 for an adult. Same shop, but my haircut cost $16.00 not counting the tip. Except for the owner, some lovely gals cut hair there these days.

When my parents moved to an upscale suburb of Newark, New Jersey in 1942, they paid $11,000 for a three-bedroom home with a stand-alone garage. I sold it for many multiples of that and it was essentially the same house with a few improvements. I sold because, in 2000, the town had reevaluated the property and literally doubled the taxes. Ten years later, a second reevaluation was deemed worthy of an article in The Wall Street Journal.

My parents put two sons through college on the earnings of my Father, a CPA with vivid memories of the Great Depression. He was a liberal, a Democrat, and advocate of the United Nations. Starting in the 1950s Mother taught gourmet cooking in the adult schools that sprang up after the war, earning enough to purchase the family cars and otherwise contribute to the budget. They remained married for over sixty years. He never learned to drive.

After the haircut, I topped out the gas, a little under a half-tank, and paid $21 for a mixture of gasoline and ethanol, the latter mandated by the government and heavily subsidized. The cost included state and federal taxes. I can recall when gasoline in the 60s and 70s was around 60 cents a gallon. I can also remember long lines at the pumps in both 1967 and 1973-74 when the Saudis, angered by the U.S. support for Israel, implemented oil embargoes.

A visit to the supermarket these days is a carnival of sticker-shock. The price of food has been rising thanks in part to the increase of the cost of energy to produce it and the diversion of corn to produce ethanol that reduces the mileage you get from the gas you purchase and likely harms your car’s engine. Corn is a major feedstock so the cost of a steak is rising too.

During WWII, the milk was delivered to my home by a horse-drawn wagon. Before refrigeration became widely available, we kept it in an ice box that required the delivery of large blocks of ice. There was radio, but no television. If you wanted air conditioning, you had to go to the local movie theatre. Price of admission, plus popcorn cost a kid about twenty-five cents. I saw my first television program in the 1950s. Within no time, everyone had a TV.

When I attended elementary, middle and high school there was zero talk about illegal drug use because there was none and I cannot recall any mention, let alone the teaching of heterosexual or homosexual sex of any kind. The school day began with a pledge of allegiance and a prayer. We did not have a politically correct curriculum or have to listen to fantasies about the planet heating up.

We did not recycle because everyone knew it was just the garbage.

It was the rare child who came from a family that had experienced divorce or who was being raised by a single parent. There was no segregation in the north, but my high school was almost completely white. That ratio has been reversed.

The Draft ensured that every able-bodied young man would serve a minimum of two years in the military learning the arts of warfare. We had all been born early enough to have passed through World War Two as very young children. This was followed by a conflict in Korea in the 1950s when we were teens. By the time the Vietnam War came along it was a new generation of conscripts fighting it. After that, the military became entirely staffed by volunteers.

The biggest scandal of the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower involved a vicuna coat his chief of staff had accepted as a gift. It would take Watergate to stain and end Nixon’s presidency, an ugly sexual dalliance to undermine Clinton’s, and a parade of congressional felons that constitutes a non-stop perp-walk these days.

Since I was a lad the government added a Department of Education, a Department of Energy, a Department of Homeland Security, the Environmental Protection Agency, and others I cannot recall. Regulation of everything has exploded. Borrowing and spending has exploded. If anybody had told me back then that the government was broke, I would have thought he was crazy, but the debt ceiling kept being raised until there is, in effect, no ceiling.

In my memory, American society began to shift from traditional values and patterns in the 1960s. The century-long failure of the South to rid itself of the aftermath of the Civil War, the Jim Crow laws, eventually found expression among blacks, but it also caused riots in U.S. cities.

In time, gays in New York would rebel against police harassment and a whole new movement would be sparked, culminating in the demand for same-sex marriage, along with an end to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in the military. The lives of women changed with the advent of “the Pill” and demands for more equality.

Sex, drugs and rock’n roll became the order of the day. We have gone from Frank Sinatra to Lady Ga-Ga. Later generations than mine share a more chaotic vision of society and a far more costly one in which to live.

It has taken the emergence of the Tea Party movement to capture and focus the independent voters who have seesawed back and forth between the comfort of Eisenhower's conservatism to the free-spending of Lyndon Johnson, the conservative values of Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama’s effort to force European-style socialism on America.

In my life, we have gone from the Great Depression to an era in which whole nations have discovered that a highly centralized government inherently cannot function without bankrupting its citizens whether they live in the U.S., the United Kingdom, Portugal, Greece or in the former Soviet Union.

As international organizations have flourished, from the United Nations to the European Union, the more unwieldy, corrupt, and grasping they have become.

We live now in the Age of Terrorism. No one in authority seems to want to acknowledge the source, the threat to civilization called Islam. Few Americans knew anything about Islam before 9/11. Now you can’t get on a plane without a full body scan and search.

If your grandpa or grandma say they miss the “good old days”, keep in mind that in many fundamental ways, they really were good.

© Alan Caruba, 2010