Liberals are Selective about Diversity

          The opinion section of the March 10, 2023 ICO featured the ICO DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) tribe out in full force, as is usual. It reminded me of the ICO’s aversion to diversity if such includes conservatives, since this year is the tenth anniversary of the ICO informing me that henceforth any letters I submitted of a “repetitive” nature would not be published in the ICO. I’ve collected many of my ICO rejects in a blog icocensored.blogspot.com. The only thing repetitive about them is that they offended the ICO’s liberal sensitivities. 

        Since many universities now mandate signing a DEI statement as a condition of employment, the ICO may soon require one to be published.

 

The ICO editorial lamented states’ policies concerning drag shows, favorite childhood books, and gender reassignment. About drag shows, I’m surprised that liberals don’t label them “cultural appropriation” in their quest to control intellectual activity. For example, one of my writing instructors, Myriam Gurba, accused Jeanine Cummins, author of American Dirt, of not being a legitimate author because she is not “Latinx”. I guess that would also apply to Grapes of Wrath because Steinbeck wasn’t an Okie. 

 

About childhood entertainment, liberal banning includes some Dr. Suess books, Little House on the Prairie, Barbar, Curious George, Huckleberry Finn, and a personal favorite, Song of the South. 

 

Concerning gender reassignment, many public schools allow students to socially transition — change their name, pronouns, or gender expression — without parental consent, to follow federal and state student privacy guidance. I doubt parents are told that some school policies prohibit parents to be informed of significant issues if their child requests it. I also doubt that schools are competent in such issues and could easily do more harm than good. So much for choice belonging to “the person and their supportive parents.”

 

 

 

 

Violent Crime Highest in Blue Cities - Paul Krugman's Pants on Fire!

Lately several liberal columnists – Paul Krugman is one – have written that the crime rate is higher in many Red than in Blue states. So I decided to check this out, and since in many large cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco many crimes go unreported or not charged – a Liberal thing that reduces crime rates while actual crime soars – I decided to examine murders. 

And I found that Krugman was right – in a way. Many of the highest murder rates are in Red states, Mississippi (20.5) and Louisiana (19.9) leading the way. (Link)

 

However, a nonstate, Washington, DC, has the highest murder rate by far, 32.78 murders per 100,000 people. I had already done some research about murder rates by race in 2019 and found that Blacks, who are 14.2% of the population, commit 49% of murders. (Link)

 

On that basis, I created a hypothesis that a state’s crime rate – at least for murder, the most heinous crime – may have more to do with where persons who murder at a high rate reside versus whether those states are Red or Blue. That led me to tread on ground that only few would dare, the race aspect of the crime of murder.

 

A comparison of homicides with Black populations by state showed a strong correlation of density of Black population and murder rate. Washington, DC, Mississippi, and Louisiana were numbers 1, 2 and 3 on both lists, and only two states with murder rates over 12.3, Oklahoma and New Mexico, were outside of the South and Mid-West areas with high Black population percentages – over the US average of 14.2%. (Link)

 

At this point I was tempted to add Krugman and several other Liberal columnists to a category “Liars by Omission.” But there’s more.

 

Krugman et al also charged that crime was higher in many Red state cities, and again they were right – sort of. A list of the twenty cities with highest violent crime rates in 2022 included eight in Red states and a dozen in Blue, but eighteen of the twenty cities had Democrat administrations, one was non-partisan, and one (Anchorage) was Republican. More Liberal columnists lying by omission, thereby earning a place in the Liars category. (Link)

By exposing the obvious racial component in violent crime, in the eyes of Liberals I’ve earned a place in the Racist category. Even if I’m right I’m wrong, judgmental, and thoughtless too. They are sure that White systemic racism is the cause and I guess that is why ninety percent of murdered Blacks are killed by other Blacks, and both victim and murderer are usually young males. Only eight percent of Black murders are by Whites, so “Black Lives Don’t Matter” seems to be the real Blacks’ slogan.

 

And before Blacks can say, to paraphrase Flip Wilson, “The (White) Devil made me do it!”, about 90% of the Black vote goes to Democrats, and Democrats run those high violent crime cities. Black Votes Matter!

 

In 2019 the Blacks killed by police total was 251, or 10% of the total of 2,574 Blacks killed by other Blacks. (Link)

 

The Washington Post disputes this statistic and publishes a study showing that police kill about 1,000 per year, of which about 270 are Blacks. The Post found that “The rate at which black Americans are killed by police is more than twice as high as the rate for white Americans.” That would seem justifiable, since Blacks commit murder at a rate 3.45 times the rate for all others. (Link)

 

It would be informative to know how many of the Blacks killed by police were in the course of violence being committed by Blacks on other Blacks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fact checking Liberal fact checkers is a full-time job.

A local writer's letter to our local newspaper, the ICO, and Joe Biden’s debate performance provided enough malarkey for a book, let alone an ICO letter. The writer said that only three of 36 green companies, not half, that received stimulus funds had failed. However, Romney only cited the seven funded in 2009 and 2010, four of which have already failed (over half). It’s too early to judge the ones funded in 2011, although eight more have filed for bankruptcy, and the rest seem shaky.

The writer also wrote that Obama didn’t cut Medicare $716 billion, although Medicare actuaries say he did. Without reinstatement, Medicare reimbursement to hospitals and providers will have to be reduced to below the Medicaid rate, meaning that many providers will stop taking Medicare patients.

Also not mentioned was that Romney’s tax cut will be far less than $5 trillion after some deductions are cut or reduced, and he overlooked that Democrats ran Congress after January 4, 2007 and passed budgets that began the trillion dollar deficits that increased federal debt $7.8 trillion, or almost half (47%) of the current $16.5 trillion total.

Biden malarkey included that the Obama administration didn’t know: the late Libyan ambassador wanted more security; that the Republican budget didn’t specify cutting embassy security; al Qaeda hasn’t been “decimated”; taxes would be raised on families and small businesses making less than $1,000,000 per year (and for some under $200,000); Syria is not five times the size of Libya (it’s one-tenth); Obama hasn’t ordered all American troops from Afghanistan by 2014 (30,000 stay); Catholic institutions are forced to cover contraception; and Joe voted for the second Iraq war and war in Afghanistan, and the prescription drug benefit under Medicare Part D.

Joe was a buffoon lying through his smiling teeth.

The Left's Census, Post Office, and Healthcare Follies

The Left here in northern California has an incredible faith in government, quite unlike the Left of thirty or thereabouts years ago. For example, they want a single payer system for healthcare, the total abolishment of private insurance companies; in other words, a government monopoly.

Not long ago Alice and one of our leading leftists were comparing notes about another government program, the Census. Every ten years the Census lays an egg in our area, since the Post Office will not do home delivery in our rural area, and the Census will not allow post office box delivery of the mailed Census forms. Therefore, all the Census forms mailed to our area are returned to the Census office as undeliverable, since they are addressed to our property addresses instead of our Post Office boxes.

Knowing this to be the case, we do a variety of things to comply with Census requirements, such as getting forms from a local non-government social services office and mailing them in.

However, even after we do that the Census hires and sends in an army of Census workers hired outside of our area and therefore paid wages plus transportation, lodging, and meals expenses to come here and go house to house to complete the census. The landlady of one of the downtown inns said June was her best month in years because she was full of Census workers. At the same time, we had an abnormally high rate of unemployed in our area who, if hired by the Census, could have worked from their homes and saved the government the expenses of the out-of-towners, plus cut down on unemployment and welfare benefits paid to locals.

After I filled out and sent in our census form ahead of the deadline, Alice and I went on an African safari vacation. When we came back we found notices from three different census workers, two pinned on our front door and one on a side gate we rarely use. They had made their calls over two weeks after we sent in the completed form.

(The Census chief says that their shaky computer system won't be a problem in getting an accurate census. For more about this, click here.)

We called one of the numbers and answered the same questions that we had previously provided via mail almost a month before.

When Alice and the prominent local lefty discussed this, Alice asked: "Is there anything the government runs well?" and the Lefty replied: "The Post Office."

At this point, we need to recap that the root of our Census problem every ten years is that the Post Office will not deliver mail to our home addresses, and will not put mail addressed to our homes into our post office boxes - even though the Post Office employees know our names and our box numbers from memory.

Meanwhile, every week day United Parcel, Federal Express, and other delivery companies drive throughout our lightly populated rural area delivering to our home addresses. Frequently their service is amazing. I'll buy an item over the internet in the evening, and often the next day it will be delivered to my door, even though I haven't paid extra for expedited delivery.

And concerning healthcare, the very low Medicaid (called MediCal in California) reimbursement rate drains so much money from our small local medical center that evening and weekend services have had to be reduced severely. In Texas many doctors are dropping Medicaid patient service completely because they can't afford to provide it.

Yet the Left wants the government to run more things.

I know what the Left is smoking, because this area is one of the leading sources of marijuana, but its users say that it's supposed to be harmless.

Not if it makes the Democrats think that the government should run everything, it isn't!

Democrats for Public Healthcare Oppose School Choice

Democrats for government healthcare – the public option – oppose school choice.

Our publicly funded education option is not working well. A realistic assessment of it would declare it a failure. Evidence of failure is objective and unequivocal: over half our high school graduates require remedial courses in math and English when they go on to college. And the percentage of graduates without satisfactory math and English skills that don’t go to college is probably in the range of eighty to ninety percent.

Taxpayers are given bitter choices to educate their children. They can send them to public schools, accepting inadequate education outcomes. They can move into expensive housing areas which have high-performing public schools. Or they can scrape and save to send their children to private schools. No matter the choice, the taxpayer funded education monopoly produces an unsatisfactory product.

The Liberals who preach that a government funded healthcare system will drive down costs through competition want nothing to do with competition from private schools. The Liberals say such competition would take money out of the public schools system, making even worse. Yet our public education costs are very high, and unlike our expensive private healthcare system, our public education system is failing us at the worse time, when education weaknesses threaten our global competitiveness.

At least our healthcare system is the most responsive to patient need in the world – as measured by the World Health Organization – and produces bestter outcomes for treating serious health problems.

Our education system is among the worst.

The former premier of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, once said that capitalists would sell the Soviets the rope to hang us.

That’s not true. We’re hanging ourselves.

"Birthers" vs. "Truthers" and "TANGers"

Liberals are enjoying ridiculing Republicans who have doubts that Barack Obama is a natural born American. I don't share those doubts, but I was interested in the proof the Left says is conclusive, for a reason I will disclose a bit later in this post.

In the case of the Los Angeles Times (click here for the article), the proof is obvious: Obama's birth certificate.

I admit when I saw Obama's "birth certificate" I was underwhelmed, since it is a modern bare-bones form without any of the things I hoped to see: attending physician, hospital, certificate number, certifying signature and stamp, &etc. In other words it looks exactly like a modern form that anyone could have filled out on a laser printer. With the Certificate No. redacted (the form notes that "ANY ALTERATIONS INVALIDATE THIS CERTIFICATE") it really does not prove anything, and I can understand why the dubious would want more.

A radio host on NPR said that Liberals have proven that Obama was not born in America. According to the host, Liberals say you can't believe anything Ann Coulter says, and Ann says Obama was America-born.

It's not like Conservatives have a monopoly on conspiracy theories, since in number and fantasy the Left is far ahead. The "Truthers" inhabit a realm to which only the truly delusional can go. Since anyone who doesn't agree with them is part of the conspiracy, in their point of view there is no valid rebuttal to their beliefs - sorry, I mean their "facts." But just for the curious, here's one of many excellent debunkers (click here) of the "9/11 Truthers." All part of the conspiracy, don't you know.

The "TANGers" claim to fame is that their leader, Dan Rather, still believes his Texas Air National Guard letters were legitimate.

Before that was the "October Surprise." when soon to be Vice-President George H. W. Bush was flown to Paris in an F-111 supersonic Air Force fighter bomber, arranged to not have the hostages held by Iran released before the Reagan/Carter election, and was whisked back to Washington.

Many people, including some of my best friends, continue to say that Bill Clinton didn't lie when he said that he "never had sex with that woman." Oral sex, you see, is not sex.

Even though it's called sex.

I wish my friends realized that their defense of Clinton's lies eliminates a big part of the sex lives of gays, lesbians, bi-sexuals, transgenders, and even adventurous heterosexuals. It cuts sex in San Francisco by more than half.

Then there are Lefties who avere that Moncia Lowinsky was part of a Republican plot. That would be a dream come true for me - Republican leaders as devious as Democrats. Think of the brilliance and planning it would take to recruit a young Jewish Democrat capable of crossing the nation, procuring an internship, catching the eye of the President, and getting him to drop his pants in the White House and decorate a blue dress.

Hillary believed Bill "didn't have sex with that woman" and blamed it all on a vast right-wing conspiracy.

For ever looney right-wing conspiracy theory the Left has ten even loonier.

Berkeley Kicks Out Its Poor

Berkeley has come up with a plan (Hot debate ahead on Berkeley's energy plans, Carolyn Jones, Chronicle Staff Writer, Saturday, April 18, 2009) to rid itself of poor homeowners and earn the applause of Liberals for “fighting global warming.” When Berkeley mandates that all homes meet strict energy standards, at a cost per home of $33,800 or more, poor homeowners will be forced to sell out and move away. Wealthy buyers will benefit from the forced sales, and the poor sellers’ homes will have lost value equal to the cost of compliance with the new standards. The poor will be forced to sell their homes at lower values, in effect paying the costs to meet the new standards for the wealthy buyers.

What a deal! Berkeley upgrades the economic status of its residents, increases its property tax base, and becomes the darling of global warming activists. Berkeley’s greenhouse gas reductions will be less than the increase from a new Chinese coal-fired plant in its first week of operation, but as with all liberals, it’s the gesture that counts.

UPDATE: Just after I posted this, I found a new Chronicle report that Berkeley was having second thoughts about the wording of their 145-page Climate Action Plan (Berkeley councilors: Home upgrades not required). Apparently Berkeley now is saying that the word "require" in its plan should be replaced with "set a goal." That's a welcome and unexpected sign of sanity on the part of some Berkeley politicians, but it leads me to wonder what that does to "The Plan." The obvious answer is that it pretty well voids it, since the things that Berkeley says are essential to meet its goal to reduce greenhouse gas emmissions by 80 percent won't be happening.

But the poor of Berkeley are not out of the woods yet. There still may be compliance costs - the sum of $10,000 was mentioned - required when the "home is sold or remodeled."

But most at City Hall agreed that Berkeley will continue to aggressively crusade for environmental improvements.

"We're not backing off this," Marks said. "We're very certain we're going to have to get there."

I'm very certain that Berkeley is not going "to get there" by backing off their "Plan," but then again I'm absolutely certain that Berkeley wasn't going to accomplish anything anyway, no matter if they shut Berkeley down completely. Certainly there must be at least one person in Berkeley who will tell the rest that Berkeley is an unmeasurable blip in greenhouse gas emmissions. Even if Kyoto had been totally implemented successfully, the reduction in global temperatures would have been an unmeasurable 0.07 degree Centigrade. Somehow the Senate was bright enough to recognize that and voted 95-0 to not ratify Kyoto, even with Bill Clinton and Al Gore as President and Vice-President.

However, I'm sure that Berkeley will declare its "Climate Action Plan" a complete success, because to liberals, it's the gesture that counts.

Carbon Offsets, the Pet Rocks of Environmentalism

San Francisco has come up with a great idea to tap into the idiocy that once fueled the Pet Rock buying craze, combined with the ancient Catholic Church malpractice of selling indulgences: purchasing carbon offsets at kiosks at San Francisco International airport to atone for the guilt of flying.

The carbon offsets are even an improvement over purchased indulgences and Pet Rocks. Unlike an indulgence, purchased to take away a sin you don’t want anyone to know about, that you also promise not to repeat, the carbon offset can be proudly displayed. Rather than hiding your sin, you want the whole world to know how environmentally sensitive you are. Another improvement over purchasing indulgences, you really don’t have to stop flying – you just keep flying, and keep buying.

And the Pet Rock? After the first chuckle, most people realized what a dumb waste of money they were. The joke got old fast. Carbon offsets, on the other hand, are a constant reminder to others that you are “holier than thou.”

All you have to do is pay your money and play the farcical game that what you are doing “makes a difference.” Forget that the developing nations of the world are going to keep pouring out CO2 at ever increasing rates as they progress. Ignore the fact that man-produced CO2 is a tiny component, a fraction of one percent, of the natural greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (water vapor is over 95 percent). Be oblivious that ice core records cited by Al Gore in “An Inconvenient Truth” actually showed temperature increases preceded, not followed, increased atmospheric CO2.

Most of all, be clueless that carbon offsets, unlike Pet Rocks, are a monumental scam because there are no effective mechanisms to measure and audit their promises.

However, in this time of economic travail, let it not be said that I tried to discourage the efforts of sincere individuals to pump some of their excess cash into the economy. Pet rocks, indulgences, and carbon offsets are proof that some fools have too much money.

And that a fool and his/her/its money are soon parted.

Blacks are Racist and Homophobic

Blacks are not only racist, they’re homophobic.

California gays are in high dudgeon over passage of Proposition 8, which amended the California constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman.

Many gays are calling for boycotts of individuals and organizations that supported passage of Proposition 8. So far their greatest outrage has been directed towards the Mormon Church. That’s understandable. Mormons in California are relatively few in number and few of them support Democrats.

A few bolder and reckless gays are criticizing the Catholic Church, but most aren’t. The Catholic Church in California is huge, and roughly thirty percent of the voters in this election were Catholics. More importantly to gay activists, many Catholics are Democrats, and Liberal leaders don’t want to annoy them.

“Mormons si, Catholics no” is the Democrat motto for dispensing criticism.

Blacks voted approximately 95% Democrat (about the same as journalists), but roughly 65% supported Proposition 8.

Again, most Liberals and even gay activists are not criticizing Blacks support of Proposition 8.

“Stick it to the Mormons. It’s safe.”

Over half of Hispanic voters supported Proposition 8.

Do you think Liberals or Democrat leaders are going to criticize Hispanic voters?

Liberals and Democrat leaders are like the guy who was pushed around by a big bully, then got even by beating the Hell out of a little guy.

Democrats Believe in Man-Caused Global Warming and UFO’s

When you ask a Democrat about the problems with Social Security and Medicare, they reply: “What problems?”

But if you ask them about UFO’s, they’ll say, “Of course there are UFO’s, and we have the proof but the Bush Administration won’t let you see it!” (And neither would the Democrat administrations of Clinton and Carter.)

The most recent prominent Democrat believer, joining the ranks of others such as Jimmy Carter, is John Podesta. Although Podesta was chief of staff in the Clinton Administration, and could easily have asked his boss to show him and the World the proof, he’s waited until now to expose one of his weird beliefs (I'm sure he has others, especially about taxes). [ link to news article about Podesta, Carter, and UFO's ]

I’m convinced that Democrats had rules to keep all the weird stuff hidden until after the election. If I were trying to convince the American voters that they could put their faith in a Democrat, I would have put the heavy hand of censorship on nut-case beliefs like UFO’s.

Add UFO’s to the other secular Liberal religions, like “Anthropogenic Global Warming” and “Achieving Prosperity Through Tax Increases.” None have yet been demonstrated in the real world, and that is their prime attraction to Liberals. All they need is faith, all they have to do is believe.

Of course they criticize Christians, but not believers in any other religions, for having faith in unproven, unknowable things, and then have belief systems of their own creation.

Che Lives! (In Our Colleges, Anyway)

Che Lived! Che Lives! Che will never die!

Che lives. But in Guatemala, Che only lives on T-shirts sold in T-shirt shops which are usually located next to a McDonalds, a Burger King, Domino’s Pizza, etc., or a distinctive and very successful Latin-American fast-food chain founded in Guatemala over thirty years ago, Pollo Campero.

The face of Che is ubiquitous, but his beliefs aren't.

“Communism was a great system for making people equally poor. In fact, there was no better system in the world for that than communism.” Extolling Globalization, Thomas L. Friedman wrote this in “The World is Flat,” and added that “Capitalism made people unequally rich.”

Besides totally agreeing with Friedman, I would extend his assessment to communism’s bastard step-child, socialism, and add that capitalism succeeds wherever it is tried.

Of course there are many true believers in Communism, but few of them live in the former citadels of Communism, the Soviet Union and China. Even most North Koreans and Cubans have lost their Marxist zeal; they saw their countries go from the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat to the deification of dictators. But now the Gods of Communism are either dead, discredited, or disregarded: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Mao, Castro, and Kim Il Sung.

I've seen some of their statues already on junk piles, and look forward to see others added to the trash heap of history. How delightful to think of Mao in his mausoleum observing China's mad race down the capitalist road Mao devoted his life and the deaths of a hundred million Chinese to stop.

Now the only place communism and socialism are valued and revered are amongst ignorant and illiterate peoples of undeveloped countries, and in the halls of academia amongst Progressive economists, environmentalists, and anti-Globalizationists.

They and Che are good company.

Rural Guatemala is Progressive Heaven

After a couple of days in Guatemala City, Alice and I flew to Isles de Flores and overnighted there, then went by mini-bus to the Mayan ruins at Tikal. Along the way we passed through several small villages, and I was struck how well they reflected the Progressives’ idea of “the way things ought to be.” For one, it was obvious that those things Progressives deplore had not reached rural Guatemala. There were no sweatshops to exploit their labor. In fact, there were no signs the insidious tentacles of Globalization had touched anywhere. Ubiquitous speed bumps annoyed tourists passing through, but there were no shops or restaurants or crafts displays to entice them to spend their Quetzales.

“What unadulterated purity!” I exclaimed, watching human Weed-Eaters™ trim high grass by the road with rhythmic swings of their machetes, pausing only to sharpen them. Then I observed two young boys carrying bundles of firewood up a steep trail. “Those boys are so lucky!” I thought. “They could be working in a sweatshop, earning only $5 a day, but here they are out in the morning sun carrying firewood on their backs for several kilometers. Aren’t they lucky not to be exploited? And aren’t their parents lucky too, getting to spend every day not working for anything at all!”

I rejoiced further when I saw a slightly older boy carrying a large container of water. “He must be so happy he doesn’t have to work to help his family,” I surmised, as he wobbled along while the sun rose higher.

Because Globalization has already polluted Guatemala’s larger cities, per-capita gross domestic product is $5,400 per year, $100 more than China. While wood smoke permeates rural areas, the stench of diesel prevails in the cities; the first denotes abject poverty, the other economic progress.

Iraq War Deaths in Perspective

Since the Iraq War began over five years ago, the United States has suffered about 3,400 combat deaths, roughly the number killed in any four-month period in Vietnam during the last year of LBJ's presidency. Or sometimes in a few days in World War II.

So far this year, Mexico has had 2,700 drug murders in only two-thirds of a year, about 700 deaths less than the total US combat deaths in over five years of war.

In 2008, Oakland, California has almost as many homicides as the United States has had combat deaths in Iraq. Add in homicides in Richmond, California, and the total probably exceeds US combat deaths in Iraq.

It's not cold or heartless of me to put these deaths in perspective. I regret each death, but I've lived long enough to have known of far worse, and I don't understand Liberals' concerns for our war deaths, but lack of concern for far worse associated with their consumption of illegal drugs that drive the drug war deaths.

Is it because the drug war deaths in Mexico can't be blamed on George Bush?

Give Us Back Our Chains!

The International Herald Tribune, now an acolyte of The New York Times, laments the deaths of “–isms” in India caused by recent rampant individualism (In India, idealism falters in the face of power, by Anand Giridharadas, published: August 14, 2008). According to the author, when India was powerless, they were a land of idealists bent on reforming the world. Now that Indians are doing well, they just want to do better instead of spending a lot of time in government showing others The Way.

One can understand this turning inward. India has long been a land of external restraints. Families told you whom to marry, what to study, where to work. Bureaucrats told you whether you could get a phone line or start a business. A caste determined the amount of respect you could command.

Today millions of Indians, from maidservants to doctors, are revolting against those destinies. They share a new belief in the power of self-contained individuals: a belief that individuals must not slight elders but must no longer depend on them; must not forget their roots but must now stray from them; must not crave a government job like their fathers but must now survive as though the state did not exist.

And, in relying ever more on themselves, this group of Indians relies ever less on India.

It might seem uncharitable of me to mention that when Indians were full of ideas and dedicated to government service, i.e., were red hot socialists, almost all Indians led miserable lives mired in crushing poverty. Intellectuals spent copious quantities of time discussing almost everything and accomplishing absolutely nothing. As such they were prototypical intellectuals, knowing that they have the answers to all the ills of mankind, if mankind would just put them in charge.

Much to their chagrin, when socialism waned and individuals gained power formerly exercised by the state, individuals found that freedom empowered them in a way that following political ideologues never did. They discovered that people serve states, not vice versa, and that by relying on themselves they do better for India than they did when they placed their reliance on India.

Of course, that is anathema to liberal politicians, who understand that if the people realize they can take care of themselves, they won’t be beholden to politicians for special treatment and favors.

To a liberal politician, losing faith in the power of government to take care of you is a loss of idealism. It is also the first, best step to take to prosperity for both the individual and the state, and to gain true power for both.

Socialist Masquerade - "Progressive" Economics

(This is a response to a letter in our local weekly paper, The Independent Coast Observer, by a local Liberal touting the virtues of Progressive economic theory. From my studies of Progressive theory, it seems just another word to disguise warmed over Socialism.)

Mr. Skibbins is apparently proud of Progressive economists, since his letter was only a bibliography of their names and titles, devoid of any other information besides their admission of belief in greater government control. I could cite many experts more prominent and relevant to current economic theory that the Progressives, but two will suffice: Mr. Skibbins’ late Sea Ranch neighbor, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek, prescient author of The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944.

Progressives strangely think that if an uneducated, unskilled, malnourished worker overseas can do a job as well and cheaper than an American, that the American should want his government to fight outsourcing instead of encouraging him to get a better job. Or that it is in mankind’s best interest to deny the world’s impoverished the means to survive and perhaps even prosper.

While progressives believe in government solutions, John Maynard Keynes was shown the light. He said that Hayek’s claim that temporary governmental fixes usually become permanent and growing government programs, stifling the private sector and civil society, was "deeply moving." Hayek included this quote on the cover of The Road to Serfdom.

Mr. Skibbins concludes that corporations should not be “making profits for their owners at the expense of the rest of us.” Of course, corporations get their operating capital from investors. When they are unprofitable, owners lose their investments, the corporations soon cease operations, and then their former workers join the ranks of the unemployed. And unlike the “exploited” workers dear to Progressive lore, today’s workers are usually also owners of corporations through 401K and IRA investments.

Government already mismanages many things at the expense of the rest of us, particularly Social Security and Medicare, so I’m sure they could completely foul up corporations if we were fools enough to let them try.

Unintended Environmental Consequences of Liberalism

The world is filled with solutions to human suffering that Liberals won’t allow. In fact, many of Liberals' pet programs add immeasurably to human suffering.

Examples abound. The most recent is rampant world hunger. What have Liberals done to make it worse?

Liberals vain fight against global warming is the prime self-inflicted wound on the poor people of the world. The quest for alternative fuels is literally taking food out of the mouths of babes, while at the same time causing a net increase in greenhouse gases that will take a century or more to overcome. Biofuels are a horrible idea whose time should never come.

The only reason that Liberals are so hot to find alterative energy sources is because they are totally focused in opposition to the only viable, nonpolluting, environmentally friendly answer to world energy needs, nuclear power. Solar, wind, wave, hydroelectric, biomass – most of these generation methods require huge government subsidies, and even then are only marginally economical when the price of oil is at record highs.

(UPDATE: Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore agrees we must develop nuclear energy, and that alternative power generating systems can't satisfy world energy needs.)

Beside high costs, the alternative energy sources are also incredibly polluting to the environment. I laughed when I read of environmentalists protesting fencing along the United States/Mexico border, and not the plans for huge solar and wind power installations in pristine desert and mountain habitats. The only nonpolluting power source that is economical without massive subsidies is hydroelectric, and it causes unbelievable damage to fisheries and loss of natural rivers and habitat.

Besides diverting government resources from better uses and increasing environmental pollution, the environmentalists’ opposition to nuclear energy has had an enormous unintended consequence: an enormous increase in burning coal, oil, and natural gas to meet the phenomenal growth in world energy needs. If nuclear energy was given the political and economic support it deserves, there would have already been great progress in design improvement and the construction of nuclear power plants. In the absence of support for nuclear energy, the only feasible option for meeting world power requirements has been the wholesale addition of coal, oil, and natural gas generating plants.

Liberals have shown the same genius for fouling things up with food itself, the shortage of which is now causing hunger and death daily at an ever increasing rate. Their opposition to genetically modified foods is a marvel of ignorance and shortsightedness. Plants have already been modified for greatly increased yields per acre, using less water, less fertilizer, and less pesticides, while also providing essential nutrients that eliminate serious health problems like child blindness.

European Liberals, exercising their misguided elitism, call them “Franken foods” and ban them from both production and consumption. How does that protect the environment? Liberals say it prevents the genetically modified plants from crossing with native or natural species, as if species purity was sufficient justification for the ban.

However, besides worsening world hunger, their ban continues the pressure on burgeoning water shortages, causes more air pollution from using natural gas to make fertilizer, requires the use of pesticides and chemicals because natural plants are not as insect and disease resistant as genetically modified ones, and increases water pollution from the pesticide and chemical runoff from farms into streams.

Liberal efforts to combat global warming provides material for a large book to chronicle the messes it is creating for current and future generations. Laying aside the fact that global warming is natural, not caused by man, the solutions that Liberals propose all arrive at the same end: enormous amounts of resources are expended in a doomed, vain attempt to reverse natural climate change. The bottom line on such efforts is very clear. The climate will change, just as it has hundreds of times before for hundreds of thousands of years. Along the way, the economic progress of billions of poor people will be slowed or reversed, and they will be constrained to living short, brutish lives of poverty and deprivation. In turn, this will create more social and political unrest, with resulting wars of revolution fueled by inequality and discontent.

If those same resources were consumed in increasing economic activity, and resultant prosperity and accumulation of wealth, the formerly poor of the world would be able to adapt readily to warming, cooling (very likely, and much more damaging), or any thing else that nature throws their way.

With prosperity, and abundant energy from nuclear power, the formerly poor can do what the citizens of the developed world already do: modify their environment to fit their needs and desires, just as Americans have been doing for decades.

Why are the populations of the southern parts of the United States increasing faster than the more northerly? Because Americans have been voting with their feet for “warmer” ever since air conditioning made comfortable living further south possible. At the same time, better heating, insulation, and air conditioning have also made living and working in the more extremely variable northern climates more bearable.

These are just a few of the many ways Liberal policies create enormous unintended negative consequences, and the ways that economic progress and resulting prosperity would solve even the messes Liberalism causes.

Even as Liberals work their butts off to try and really foul things up.

John McCain’s Taxes - New York Times Still Can’t Get It Right

This is the sort of story that even The Times couldn’t mess up, especially when they assign it to a veteran reporter supported by an army of experienced, highly paid editors. All it involves is John McCain – more probably his tax accountant – giving The New York Times copies of McCain’s 2006 and 2007 tax returns, and then the veteran reporter and supporting army of editors turns out the story.

What could be simpler?

This is the story. McCain releases tax returns - Papers for wealthy wife, who files separately, aren't made public, Barry Meier, New York Times, Saturday, April 19, 2008.

Apparently nothing is simple enough for The New York Times. Although The Times reports that John McCain released his 2006 and 2007 income tax returns, The Times chose to report totals for the two years instead of the individual amounts for each tax year. Fair enough. I can handle that, although it did make me scratch my head a bit when McCain’s Navy pension was reported as $114,854.

Whoa, I said. I knew Navy Captain McCain had served about a year longer than the 21.5 years I served in the Air Force, and that he retired as a Captain (O-6) whereas I retired as a Major (O-4), but that wouldn’t make his retired pay triple mine. I checked another source and found it was only $58,358 in 2007, substantially but reasonably higher than mine.

Why did The Times choose to lump two tax years together? It makes no sense to me.

But then I read the clinker in The New York Times report. To quote The Times, “He had additional untaxed income, including $114,854 from his Navy pension.” (Italics and bold print courtesy of me)

(UPDATE: The Los Angeles Times finally showed a hint of a nose for news by investigating and disclosing the nature of John McCain's tax-free Navy pension, and that it was determined based on the injuries and torture he suffered at the hands of the barbaric North Vietnamese - wasn't there a Geneva Convention issue invoved in their treatment of POWs? Or does that only apply to the United States and unlawful combatants? The New York Times, meanwhile, amply demonstrated profound ignorance of military matters to go with its shocking lack of news sense.)

(Please read the comments following this post to see the correction to my statement a reader provided. John McCain did report that his Navy pension was tax free. However, The Times did not follow up to find out and explain why normally taxed income was tax free. The commenter suggests it has something to do with McCain's injured and/or POW status, and he has been proven correct. In any case, there is a story here that The Times missed because of their ignorance of military issues. Their reporting of this issue still leaves its readers with more questions than answers.)

No wonder civilians think we retired military have it soft. Ignorant reporters and editors give their overwhelmingly civilian readership the impression that military retirement income is untaxed, when it is taxed just like any other income. The only untaxed income some military retirees will receive is Social Security, and even that is taxed if we dare to have other earned income before reaching full Social Security entitlement age.

The Times reporter and editors are not the only egregiously military-ignorant people in influential places. A few years ago California had a cadaverous Senator named Alan Cranston. One slow news day Senator Cranston decided he should grab a headline, so at a news conference he loudly bemoaned and protested military “double dippers.” According to Senator Cranston, it was almost criminal that military members would serve to retirement, retire, draw retirement pay, get a civilian job and finally pay into Social Security, and then retire from that job and draw both Social Security and military retirement; ergo the label “double dipper.”

What Senator Cranston did not know, secure in his cocoon of ignorance of the military, was that the military members paid into Social Security their entire careers, and that it was the Federal civilian employees who didn’t. Federal civilian employees would earn a civil service retirement, all the while not paying into Social Security, then get a civilian job, pay Social Security, retire from it, and then draw both a government pension and Social Security.

Dumb Democrat Cranston, sanctimoniously trying to point criticism at the Liberal-despised military, was actually casting stones at one of the most loyal Democrat constituencies, public service employees. Today, 29 percent of state and local government employees, and most Federal civilian workers hired before 1984, are still not in Social Security. All the military, going back to 1957, paid into Social Security.

Congress finally woke up long enough to throw Federal employees hired after 1984 into Social Security. Those Federal employees hired before 1984 knew a bad deal when they saw it, and most wanted no part of Social Security, even though it is a Federal government program, and they were Federal government employees.

Given this vast trove of Liberal ignorance of the military, it’s no surprise that The Times messed up a simple report about John McCain’s taxes. Just like they messed up on military murder rates, and CBS News messed up on reporting veteran suicides.

To Liberals, ignorance of the military is bliss, and they are nothing if not blissful.

The Idiot, Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I titled a previous post,” Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Fool or Fraud.” Since then I’ve refined my labeling, and it’s clear Ferlinghetti is a mere idiot, too educated to be a fool, too ignorant to be a fraud.

Harkening back to my post of yesteryear, in a San Francisco Chronicle article, concerning the atomic bombing of Japan Mr. Ferlinghetti observed that "It was a monstrous, racist act, the worst the U.S. ever committed," he says. "Had the Japanese been white-skinned, those bombs would not have dropped."

I proceeded to document that we had bombed the white-skinned Germans much more intensely, causing the Germans far greater suffering, loss of life, and destruction of property, than we had the Japanese, and further that the atom bombs dropped on Japan unquestioningly saved millions of Japanese civilians, and hundreds of thousands of American military.

If anything, dropping the atom bombs on Japan was an act of mercy. Even an idiot like Ferlinghetti must realize that the Japanese would have been fierce in defense of their homeland. If Ferlinghetti needs further convincing, he need only look at Japanese losses on Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, preludes to the invasion of the Japanese mainland.

On Peleliu, which Alice and I recently visited, less than fifty of 11,000 Japanese survived, and almost 2,000 Americans were killed.

The Japanese on Iwo Jima fought ferociously, and when defeat was inevitable, committed suicide. Only about 1,000 of the 22,000 Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima survived. US losses were 6,821, more deaths in one month than we suffered in five years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

However, as horrific as the fighting on Iwo Jima was, it was just a prelude to the slaughter on Okinawa. Twice as many were killed (approximately a quarter of a million) during the Battle of Okinawa than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Estimates of civilian deaths go as high as one-third of Okinawa’s population, who when faced with defeat joined the Japanese military in committing mass suicides.

All of this came during the last year of war in the Pacific. What about Germany?

I’ve been reading the campaign diary of the British Royal Air Force Bomber Command, and it exposed Mr. Ferlinghetti’s infinite ignorance of how badly we treated the white-skinned Germans. I was born July 18, 1942, fairly early in the war by American standards, but the British had already been fighting for two years, and had won the Battle of Britain over a year before.

When I was born the British had been bombing German cities for over a year. I was just over a week old when Hamburg was hit by the first of many terrifying night attacks (the British Royal Air Force bombed Germany by night, the United States bombed by day).

This is an excerpt of the bomber diary entry for 26/27 July 1942:

Hamburg
403 aircraft - 181 Wellingtons, 77 Lancasters, 73 Halifaxes, 39 Stirlings, 33 Hampdens dispatched in what was probably a full 'maximum effort' for the regular Bomber Command squadrons. 29 aircraft - 15 Wellingtons, 8 Halifaxes, 2 Hampdens, 2 Lancasters, and 2 Stirlings - were lost, 7.2 per cent of the force.
Crews encountered a mixture of cloud and icing at some places on the route but clear weather at the target. Good bombing results were claimed. Hamburg reports show that severe and widespread damage was caused, mostly in housing and semi-commercial districts rather than in the docks and industrial areas. At least 800 fires were dealt with, 523 being classed as large. 823 houses were destroyed and more than 5,000 damaged. More than 14,000 people were bombed out. 337 people were killed and 1,027 injured.

That was one night in one German city. One year and one day later, Hamburg was hit harder:

27/28 July 1943
787 aircraft - 353 Lancasters, 244 Halifaxes, 116 Stirlings, and 74 Wellingtons - returned to Hamburg. Brigadier-General Anderson again flew in a Lancaster and watched this raid. The centre of the Pathfinder marking - all carried out by H2S on this night - was about 2 miles east of the planned aiming point in the centre of the city, but the marking was particularly well concentrated and the Main Force bombing 'crept back' only slightly.
This was the night of the firestorm, which started through an unusual and unexpected chain of events. The temperature was particularly high (30° centigrade at 6 o'clock in the evening) and the humidity was only 30 per cent, compared with an average of 40-50 per cent for this time of the year. There had been no rain for some time and everything was very dry .The concentrated bombing caused a large number of fires in the densely built-up working-class districts of Hammerbrook, Hamm and Borgfeld. Most of Hamburg's fire vehicles had been in the western parts of the city, damping down the fires still smoldering there from the raid of 3 nights earlier, and only a few units were able to pass through roads which were blocked by the rubble of buildings destroyed by high-explosive bombs early in this raid. About half-way through the raid, the fires in Hammerbrook started joining together and competing with each other for the oxygen in the surrounding air. Suddenly, the whole area became one big fire with air being drawn into it with the force of a storm. The bombing continued for another half hour, spreading the firestorm area gradually eastwards. It is estimated that 550-600 bomb loads fell into an area measuring only 2 miles by 1 mile. The firestorm raged for about 3 hours and only subsided when all burnable material was consumed. The burnt-out area was almost entirely residential. Approximately 16,000 multi-storied apartment buildings were destroyed. There were few survivors from the firestorm area and approximately 40,000 people died, most of them by carbon monoxide poisoning when all the air was drawn out of their basement shelters. In the period immediately following this raid, approximately 1,200,000 people - two thirds of Hamburg's population - fled the city in fear of further raids.

During the next two years over a million German military were pinned down by the need to protect against Allied bombing around the clock. Before the war ended, Germany was forced to send barely trained pilots into combat, and pilots had to fly both day and night missions.

After the Hamburg firestorm, many other German cities, including Berlin, were heavily bombed by day and night.

In March, 1944, the diary of the city of Frankfurt has this entry:

The three air raids of 18th, 22nd and 24th March were carried out by a combined plan of the British and American air forces and their combined effect was to deal the worst and most fateful blow of the war to Frankfurt, a blow which simply ended the existence of the Frankfurt which had been built up since the Middle Ages.

A great historical city gone, centuries of living and building obliterated in a few Hellish nights.

Then in February 1945, the Allies plastered Dresden for three days.

Temperatures reached 1000 degrees, and the air caught on fire, creating a "firestorm” that burned for four days. 1600 acres were destroyed and 135,000 were killed (some reports say the number killed cannot be determined, but that it was certainly over 50,000), including many refugees fleeing the Soviet advance on the Eastern Front.

Some historians estimate more civilians were killed in the firebombing of Dresden than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. The Germans' white skin didn't seem to save them, did it Mr. Ferlinghetti?

According to The War in the Air over Europe: "Tactics developed in Europe were employed with devastating effect in the Pacific. 20th Air Force commanding General Curtis LeMay abandoned precision bombing for area bombing with incendiaries, causing cataclysmic firestorms."

From The Strategic Bombing of Japan:

On June 15, 1944, the first B-29 raid flew from China to strike at a factory in Japan. This was the precision target bombing that the United State Army Air Forces (USAAF) had practiced for years. This policy would be abandoned shortly for area bombing of civilian targets. It would represent a major shift from the doctrine practiced in Europe and the policy that had cost so many American lives over German cities.

When Curtiss LeMay arrived and took command in January 1945, he ordered a switch from high altitude high explosive precision daylight attacks to night area bombing with a mixture of incendiaries and antipersonnel weapons. This prevented the firefighters from putting out the fires, which spread wildly.

From March 1945 through the end of the war, many Japanese cities were subjected to area bombing with incendiaries. Tokyo, Osaka, and many other cities were burned out by firestorms that reached over 1000 degrees Fahrenheit. The bombings may have killed as many as 500,000 people.

So there you have it, Mr. Ferlinghetti. The tactics used to annihilate Japanese late in the war had been developed over the preceding three-year period of area bombing German cities. Americans had come late into the practice of area bombing cities by night, and had paid for adhering to precision daylight bombing by losing aircraft and aircrews at twice the British rate.

Bomb civilians or sacrifice aircrews and aircraft? The decision makes itself. The duty of a commanding officer is to win the war quickly with the least cost to his forces. The decision was made even easier because the Germans and Japanese committed atrocities and terror attacks on civilians and cities from the start of hostilities.

I’m sure Mr. Ferlinghetti would take the opposite approach and spare the enemy’s cities and civilian populations, with the result that millions more would die, devastation would be far greater, and your own forces and armaments would suffer much heavier losses.

Your way, Mr. Ferlinghetti, would be the worst choice for friend and foe alike.

If what we did to Japan was racist, Mr. Ferlinghetti, what do you call what we did to Germany?

Socialized Medicine - the Dream is Alive

Socialized medicine shares a universal aspect of socialism: The believers in socialism (communism without a KGB) always say it will work if ever it were done properly. The problem isn’t socialism, they say, but the people running it.

However, the true believers in socialized medicine have eyes but will not see, have ears but will not hear. As they speak of the marvels of socialized medicine in Europe, the reality of Europe is quite different.

The population of the European Union is shrinking and aging rapidly, as it also becomes lower skilled and less educated. Europe’s birthrate is below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per female needed to maintain zero population growth, and even Muslim immigration with its higher birthrates is not enough to stabilize its population.

As birthrates fall, longevity rises. A shrinking workforce pays ever-higher taxes to pay the benefits of the rapidly growing elderly and disabled populations.

All of this is playing out to the background music of rapid Islamification of Europe, featuring hoards of uneducated, unskilled, and because of culture and attitudes, virtually unemployable Muslim youth.

But enough of Europe’s problems, which proponents of socialized medicine studiously ignore. We are surrounded right here, in the good old capitalist United States, with classic examples of the failure of socialized medicine. The San Francisco Chronicle chronicled just such failure in a front-page article, “Newsom ready to sue over cuts in Medi-Cal; Reduced payments to doctors would burden city, he says,” March 26, 2008.

Gavin Newsom, San Francisco’s adulterous alcoholic Mayor, who would be governor in 2010, was reacting to a 10 percent reduction in California state reimbursements to doctors who treat Medi-Cal patients, which he called “unconscionable.”

(Medi-Cal is California's medical insurance program for the poor, funded half by the state, and the other half by federal matching funds. The California 10-percent cut will be a “double-whammy,” since the federal contribution will be cut the $567 million no longer required to match state funding. Medi-Cal will cost $38 billion next year and serves 6.7 million patients at an average cost of $5,672 per patient. The 10-percent reduction is only for reimbursements to doctors. If it was against the entire program, it would be $3.8 billion, or 6.7 times greater.)

(Nationally, California is already near the bottom in reimbursing doctors for treating Medi-Cal patients and dead last in how much money it spends per Medi-Cal patient, according to the California Medical Association.)

Call it what you will, Mayor Newsom, but the State of California is in a bad state financially. Its Democrat legislature, and its pseudo-Republican governor, has always spent tax revenues like a New York Mayor patronizing an escort service. However, for many years the buoyant economy and ever-higher property values produced tax revenues almost but not quite faster than they could be squandered.

What happens to all those government services and benefits when the good times stop rolling?

According to Lenny Goldberg, executive director of the California Tax Reform Association of Sacramento, which advocates equitable taxation and is supported by labor and education groups, "We have such an irrational property tax system, we rely on the growing housing market, and then when it levels off, there's an awful lot of schools and services hanging out there."

In other words, when things don’t just keep rising – our “over exuberant” economy stalls – what happens next can be summed up succinctly:

“Oops.”

In California’s situation, the “oops” is about a 16-billion shortage of revenues compared to expenses. And it’s really a lot more than that, because California does what other governments all do (and what they don’t allow businesses to do), and ignores its burgeoning unfunded liabilities for future retirees. At a point in the not-too-distant future, this big chicken will come home to roost – it already has in some areas, such as Contra Costa County – and no matter how wonderfully the tax revenues revive, the rapidly growing retirement payments will deplete all other government-funded programs and services.

In particular, Medi-Cal will continue to have growing needs at the same time California will have less funds available for it. Mayor Newsom predicts that “physicians will stop treating Medi-Cal patients altogether and that poor people will be forced to visit hospital emergency rooms for all of their medical care.” Public hospitals, such as the ones funded by the City and County of San Francisco, must accept all patients regardless of whether they have insurance or what kind it is.

The cities, counties, states, and federal government, of course, are all in the same pickle of falling tax revenues, and all of them have based their spending programs on the assumption of ever-growing tax revenues.

Nowhere in any government plans are there provisions for temporary or permanent setbacks such as recessions, shrinking and aging populations, lower property transfers or values, or reduced benefits or public services.

Indeed, even as one system after another fails or approaches failure, there is a clamor for more of the same, and failing programs such as socialized medicine or social security are held up as examples of what we should have, or need more of.

It’s like we’re watching a train speeding down a track that we know is broken ahead, and we’re all congratulating ourselves for building a faster train. In a way, it makes sense. Without a real disaster, a world-class train wreck, we’ll do what Americans all do when faced with a problem. We’ll tinker it to death. We won’t do something new, big, visionary, or least of all, something that will effectively solve the problem.

We’ll do what we did to “reform” or “simplify” the Internal Revenue Service. We’ll add hundreds of new regulations, not get rid of any of the old ones, and just more deeply entrench the status quo.

I can hear Congress now: “They want reform? We’ll give them reform! Then they’ll learn to stop moaning and whining about reform, and keep their mouths shut!”

Still, Americans continue to ask, nay demand, that government do more of everything. Americans are like the socialists. It’s not a problem with the system, is just that the system hasn’t been done right yet.

In the meantime, be careful what you wish for, because sometimes wishes come true.

The Six Miracles of Socialism

There is no unemployment, but nobody works.

No one works, but everyone receives wages.

All get wages, but nothing can be bought with them.

Nothing is purchased, but everybody owns everything.

Everybody owns everything, but they are all dissatisfied.

All are dissatisfied, but everyone votes for the system.

(Purloined from Osmica Magazine, Yugoslavia, via Herb Caen’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle, over a decade ago, and probably more like two decades ago.)

Medical Expense Bankruptcies

A recent commenter accused me of being either an owner, employee, or a “plant” for medical insurance companies. His reasons, apparently, were that I don’t believe in socialized medicine, and I don't believe that medical expenses cause over half of personal bankruptcies.

I’m neither an owner, employee, nor a “plant” of medical insurance companies, although for a little over a year beginning in the summer of 1996 I was an internal auditor for Kaiser Permanente working out of their Oakland, California, headquarters.

On his first point, he’s right. I don’t believe in socialized medicine, and I have written several posts laden with proof that socialized medicine is doomed to failure because of its inefficiencies and the demographics of the populations it serves.

Inefficiencies: It’s run by governments, and there are no incentives for working harder or smarter. The United Kingdom National Health Service daily provides case studies in how not to provide adequate health services while having constant budget shortages, rationing of services, and longer waiting periods.

Demographics: Populations in the developed world are aging rapidly, and many are shrinking. Soon there won’t be enough workers paying in to support the ever-growing portion of the population demanding and receiving benefits.

Now to the ever-growing numbers of personal bankruptcies. A recent study found that medical problems contributed to roughly half of personal bankruptcies. When that study was announced, the word “contributed” became “caused” in the news releases.

A close study of the details of the study showed that illness did contribute to some of the bankruptcies, as would be expected. In some instances, illnesses caused loss of jobs and incomes, plus in some cases loss of medical insurance, and contributed to bankruptcy filings. In other cases even individuals with health insurance were unable to handle the co-payments, deductibles, and other medical expenses that weren’t totally covered by their policies.

The study showed that the number of personal bankruptcies was increasing at an alarming rate, and was now about twenty times greater than just two decades ago.

At this point I began to wonder about what it is about health-care costs today that make so many more American citizens go under financially than in years gone by. I know that Americans are healthier and living longer, more active lives than formerly. I supposed that could be a factor.

But then the study indicated that the profile of the typical filer for bankruptcy was a single female with two and a fraction children. At this point I heard an “Aha!” somewhere in the deep, dark recesses of my brain. Twenty years ago I never thought of the typical American family consisting of a single female and two and a fraction children.

That demographic explains a lot. A household headed by a single mother is financially very fragile. I wondered if there were more hidden gems in the study?

There were. In the past two decades easy credit proliferated, and many Americans sunk up to their eyeballs in debt. That explained why the very modest medical co-pays and deductibles were now pushing people with heath insurance over the edge into bankruptcy. They already had overextended credit, and any little unexpected extra expense was too much.

Then when the study asked them why they filed for bankruptcy, of course they mentioned that medical expenses were a contributing cause.

And when the study results were released, medical expenses “contributed” to bankruptcy became “caused” bankruptcy.

Its advocates had another stick to beat on us and drive us towards socialized medicine, at the same time most of the developed world is realizing it’s a failed system and introducing privatized medical services.