Monday, January 13, 2014
Barker's Newsbites: Monday, January 13, 2014
Another colonoscopy - and endoscopy - for the history books!
Yep... no polyps this time... and my diverticulitis is nothing to worry about.
WHY am I giving you guys my medical notes? Because one of my sisters-in-law was kind enough to pick me up after my procedure and take me home and on the ride she mentioned that her husband insists he'd rather die of colon cancer than take preventative measures.
WHAT... AN... ASSHOLE...?!?!
(And, yeah... he reads the blog...)
Yo... tough guy... you've got a wife and kids and family and friends who love you and count on your being around; don't be an asshole!
Anyway... that's "Bill's thought of the day." When it comes to preventive medical care... DON'T BE AN ASSHOLE... do what you're supposed to do!
This means YOU, bro-in-law, as well as my other brothers-in-law and all my friends and loved ones. In all seriousness... I'd probably be dead today if I didn't follow my own advice. The first time I had the procedure done... at age 40... the doc cut out something like 22 polyps out of me! (If you don't know... polyps turn into cancer.)
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http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303848104579311311675482446?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop
The political soap opera over the farm bill is wrapping up, albeit with little substantive reform...
(*SIGH*)
Some of the House-Senate negotiators are demanding new Soviet-style price controls for the U.S. milk industry, which could show up in your next grocery bill.
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD IN DISGUST*)
A farm deal was expected last week but the conference committee stalled over a plan from Minnesota Democrat Collin Peterson to replace something called the Milk Income Loss Contract.
* REPLACE... NOT ELIMINATE...
(*SCOWL*)
Dairy producers are currently paid a direct cash subsidy every month in which milk prices fall below a target level...
(*SPITTING ON THE GROUND*)
...but each farm is limited to reimbursement for the milk production of roughly 150 cows.
Mr. Peterson, the ranking Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee whose state is home to 470,000 cows, wants to create an insurance program without a cap so Big Milk can get in on the action too.
* I AM NOT... REPEAT... NOT... CALLING FOR SOME RECENTLY RETURNED WARRIOR... PERHAPS A TRAINED SNIPER... TO FORCIBLY "RETIRE" PETERSON FROM CONGRESS.
MILC has already cost $3.6 billion since it began in 2003 and the Peterson blowout would lead to exorbitant payments and political blowback.
* AGAIN... NO... NO VIOLENCE... WE MUST NOT TAKE THE LAW INTO OUR OWN HANDS...
So Mr. Peterson wants consumers to pay for hidden corporate welfare for the huge dairy cooperative Land O'Lakes instead. He wants to create a bureaucracy that would control the milk supply and artificially inflate prices for milk and staples like cheese, ice cream and yogurt.
* IT WOULD BE WRONG TO CALL FOR THE ASSASINATION OF A MEMBER OF CONGRESS...
Under Mr. Peterson's Dairy Market Stabilization Program, dairy producers would get subsidies if prices fell below the target levels, but only for 98% of their base production. Farms would in effect be penalized for exceeding their quota and would shrink supply quickly. The shock to the dairy market would cause prices to climb back above the target levels.
* NO, MY FRIENDS... WE HAVE NO RIGHT TO PROTECT OURSELVES AGAINST THESE SCUM VIA VIOLENCE...
Milk central command would be the worst dispensation yet for the dairy cartel. The feds already buy one of every five gallons, and agriculture laws already make it illegal for processors to sell milk below a regionally dictated price. Then there's a quota on dairy imports and prohibitive tariffs.
In 2005 the OECD estimated that consumers pay a 26% "milk tax" as a result of all this central planning.
* INSTITUTIONIZED THEFT IS A SMALL PRICE TO PAY FOR OUR BELOVED DEMOCRACY... WE MUST "TOLERATE" PETERSON AND ALL THE OTHER POLITICIANS SLOWLY DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY...
Mr. Peterson slipped his supply management plan past House Agriculture Chairman Frank Lucas...
* NO, NO, NO... I URGE THOSE WITH THE SKILLS TO REFRAIN FROM USING THEIR SKILLS...
...but 95 Democrats joined 196 Republicans to strip it out on the House floor last summer.
(*THUMBS UP*)
Then Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow teamed up with Mr. Peterson to revive the plan in conference...
* AGAIN... SHOOTING U.S. SENATORS IS NOT THE ANSWER...
...perhaps dressed up as a false compromise that would make the program ostensibly temporary. (That's Beltway code for "forever.")
Republicans who want the farm bill ordeal to end seemed willing to bend, until John Boehner stepped in.
* HMM...?!?!
On Thursday, the Speaker indicated that a conference report including supply management won't come for a vote.
* REALLY...?!?!
Mr. Boehner's intervention is a public service. If Congress can't improve farm policy, the more principled Members at least can avoid making it worse.
* GOOD FOR BOEHNER! (IF HE STAYS THE COURSE, THAT IS!)
* THREE-PARTER... (Part 1 of 3)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeleef/2014/01/10/one-bad-law-usually-leads-to-others-the-housing-bubble-and-dodd-frank/
Let’s start with a pop quiz. Here’s the question.
The housing bubble was caused by:
a) The boundless greed of Wall Street fat cats
b) The natural instability of markets under capitalism
c) Deregulation
d) Foolish laws passed as long ago as the 1930s
Putting the possible answers that way is almost cruel to those who have been schooled in “progressive” thinking because the first three answers all seem equally correct. How can one choose?
The correct answer is d). We would never have suffered through the housing bubble if the federal government had not blundered into the housing market, which used to function efficiently on its own.
Politicians of both parties, however, imbued with what Hayek called the “fatal conceit” that government regulation is superior to the spontaneous order of civil society, thought they could improve upon that market.
Instead, they made things far worse, creating a destructive bubble and then reacting by passing another disaster-laden law – Dodd-Frank.
Right now, America is transfixed on the unfolding cataclysm of ObamaCare, but it’s worthwhile to look back on Washington’s last policy blunder to see if it holds any lessons for us. It does.
For a clear, concise explanation of the genesis of the housing bubble, I recommend the November, 2013 Hillsdale College Imprimis, “The Case for Repealing Dodd-Frank” (http://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/archives), by Peter J. Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute. Wallison shows how the government’s serial meddling in the housing market brought about the housing boom and bust, which in turn led to yet another damaging law.
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 3)
The story begins in 1934, with the creation of the Federal Housing Administration.
Before then, the housing industry had functioned without any trouble, settling on various standards for safe lending, especially the 20% down-payment rule.
The market’s standards efficiently allocated credit to those who had shown themselves to be credit-worthy.
* NOTE....
Even though the FHA could have issued mortgages on weaker standards, for a long time it didn’t.
* AT LEAST AT FIRST... (KEEP READING!)
Between 1957 and 1961 however, Congress decided that the housing market needed stimulation and decreed that the FHA would go to a 3% down standard. “Predictably,” Wallison writes, “this resulted in a boom in FHA insured mortgages and a bust in the late ‘60s. The pattern keeps recurring and no one seems to remember the earlier mistakes.”
Precisely – no one remembers the earlier mistakes.
The feds left the housing market pretty much alone until 1992, when Congress thought it would be politically advantageous to posture as champions of “affordable housing.”
The politicians decreed that the two mortgage giants it had created, the Federal National Mortgage Association (“Fannie Mae”) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (“Freddie Mac”) would have to meet quotas for mortgages from lower-income people. Creatures of politics, the two government-sponsored enterprises had no choice but to comply.
Initially, 30% of the mortgages Fannie and Freddie purchased had to be lower income mortgages but as the housing mania kept growing, the quota was raised repeatedly, reaching 56% in 2008.
* FOLKS. ALLOW ME TO INTERJECT HERE. ALL THIS YOU'VE READ IS TRUE... BUT... WHAT THE AUTHOR LEAVES OUT IS THAT MUCH OF THE LENDING WAS NOT FOR NEW HOME CONSTRUCTION, BUT RATHER PEOPLE USING THEIR HOME EQUITY AS A SECURED LOAN. BASICALLY GOVERNMENT POLICIES AND LACK OF EFFECTIVE REGULATION - AND IN MANY CASES CRONY CAPITALISTIC COLLUSION - SET THE STAGE FOR THE HOUSING COLLAPSE.
None of that had anything to do with Wall Street or capitalist greed.
* OH, YES... YES... A LOT OF IT DID! (AGAIN, THOUGH, "WALL STREET" AND "CAPITALIST
It was a case of politics overriding the free market to help politicians win re-election.
* AGAIN... CRONY CAPITALISM.
Of course, most of those mortgages written and purchased to meet arbitrary quotas were high risk ones that would never have been made by capitalists who have to balance the possibility of profit against the risk of loss. The resulting gusher of bad mortgages was not due to any inherent instability in the natural workings of the market. It was due to instability caused by meddling politicians who stood to lose nothing if their decisions turned out badly.
(*NOD*)
Because Fannie and Freddie were regarded as having the government’s backing, financial institutions that would otherwise have carefully looked into the riskiness of the paper they were buying from them were lulled to sleep.
* BULLSHIT! THEY KNEW WHAT WAS GOING ON. THEY JUST DIDN'T CARE. THEY COUNTED ON A BAILOUT!
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 3 of 3)
Why worry about Fannie or Freddie paper when it has the U.S. Treasury behind it? Bad investments spread through the financial system like a metastasizing cancer.
Then, in 2007, the house of cards fell. Home prices that had been bid up too high began collapsing. The bubble popped, taking down huge numbers of jobs in the housing industry, erasing billions in paper wealth, and costing many individuals homes that they should never have borrowed to purchase.
Have we learned a lesson? Obviously not, because the response from Congress was to pass a new law (Dodd-Frank) that was supposed to deal with the problems caused by the previous laws. (Wallison details the ways in which Dodd-Frank both fails to cure the underlying problems and creates new ones in his book Bad History, Worse Policy.)
Dodd-Frank imposes huge new regulatory costs, while sending this message to the financial industry: don’t take risks. Banks have had to substitute compliance officers for lending officers. As a result of this counter-productive mountain of a law (over 360,000 words), there is today much less investment capital available for entrepreneurial activities and small business growth, both of which are crucial to our economic vitality. Dodd-Frank is a considerable part of the federal drag that has kept the economy’s recovery from the bubble so sluggish.
(*NOD*)
Wallison has plenty of company in arguing that Dodd-Frank was a terrible move in the wrong direction. Independent Institute scholar Vern McKinley and Hester Peirce of the Mercatus Center recently wrote on Forbes that Dodd-Frank is “a bigger ticking time bomb than ObamaCare itself.” Peirce is one of the co-authors of "Dodd-Frank: What It Does and Why It’s Flawed," another in-depth analysis of the severe, unintended consequences of a law passed just so Obama and the Democrats in Congress could say, “See, we’ve done something about the bubble problem!”
And as we read in this FHA Watch report from December, the FHA is still buying almost exclusively high-risk mortgages – 87%.
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
As the old saying goes, “When you’re in a hole, stop digging.” But government officials just keep digging deeper by encouraging risky lending. The losses, after all, won’t hurt them; they’ll fall on the taxpayers.
Whether we’re talking about housing or medical care or education or unemployment or any other socio-economic problem we face, the roots are nearly always to be found in prior government tampering with the spontaneous order of free markets and civil society.
* YEP!
Ludwig von Mises pointed this out in his book "A Critique of Interventionism," writing, “Authors of economics books, essays, articles, and political platforms demand interventionistic measures before they are taken, but once they have been imposed no one likes them. Then everyone — usually even the authorities responsible for them — call them insufficient and unsatisfactory. Generally the demand then arises for the replacement of unsatisfactory interventions by other, more suitable measures. And once the new demands have been met, the same scenario begins all over again.”
(*NOD*)
ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, and many more statutes and regulations owe their existence to that scenario. Instead of repealing a harmful law, we enact new ones that just make things worse. I’m afraid that’s an inherent problem in a democracy where the government has grown far beyond its proper functions.
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