A bit of perspective

How to save the housing market

The collapse of the housing bubble triggered the snowballing events which landed us into the current economic situation. Politicians have been trying all of the standard methods to prop up the market: tax incentives, artificially lowering mortgage rates, and throwing billions of tax dollars at the problem. These approaches have proven to be insufficient to put a floor under housing prices.

Current projections suggest that home values may fall another 10% before the end of 2010, so the pain is not over yet.

Economist Gary Shilling has an outside-the-box idea which might be far more effective, at no cost to the taxpayer.

Instead of stop-gap approaches, focus on the root of the problem: the current oversupply of houses. The housing bubble of 1996-2006 produced a surplus of 6.7 million homes. Shilling estimates that 3.9 million of those were making up for underbuilding during the S&L collapse in 1987-1991. Reduced building over the past two years has compensated for another half-million extra homes. That leaves a surplus of 2.4 million homes today.

In other situations when a glut of certain kinds of farm produce was driving prices down, the government has paid farmers to not produce certain crops. The analogous action for the current situation would be for the government to buy houses and demolish them. This would certainly alleviate the surplus of houses, but it would not be productive use of tax dollars.

Shilling has a much more sensible idea. If we open up our borders to legal immigrants who can buy homes, the housing surplus can be absorbed, resulting in the stabilization of housing prices. A million immigrants in 2009 and a million more in 2010 should go a long way to rebuilding the foundation of our housing market.

Buy a home. Save America. Become a citizen.

Sounds good to me.

But do you pay yours?

Some tax facts

The Declaration of Independence contains 1,337 words.

The Gettysburg Address was 269 words.

The King James translation of the Bible contains roughly 773,000 words.

Compare that to the Federal Tax Code, which last year exceeded 8 million words in length.

Every year the IRS sends out 8 billion pages of forms and instructions, killing more than 100,000 trees.

There are now more than 600 different tax forms.

Even the 1040 EZ "simple" form comes with 33 pages of instructions.

It is estimated that taxpayers spend $200 billion and 5.4 billion hours each year complying with Federal tax laws and completing their tax returns.

The IRS employees 114,000 people, four times as many as the FBI.

The average two-income family pays 39% of their earnings to the government in Federal, State, and local taxes.

The annual tax burden consumes every dime Americans earn from January 1 until April 13.

Gangbanger wannabe

Here is me as a gangbanger wannabe. You can find these guys all over myspace. They got the hat turned backwards and the stoopud gang signs. And they try to look all bad with their gun turned sideways like they saw it in some brainless action movie. And of course there is the dumb expression on the face that just begs you to go smack the little twit upside the head. So what I want to know is why someone would wanna be a gangbanger? What is the least bit appealing about any of that? Yo, wazzup wit dat, cuz?

In the dark

I'm not sure what the big deal about today's "Earth Hour" was. I mean, being in the dark is nothing new for a liberal.

Gratulations Conresswomun

I don't even know what to say.

Essential movies

Yesterday, Yahoo Movies released their list of 100 Movies to See Before You Die. They are careful to make the point that their criteria went beyond the entertainment value, commercial success, or awards earned by each movie to assess the cultural and historical importance of each movie.

They avoided the most common trap of focusing too much on recent movies. With 76 of the films made before 1980, they acknowledge what we already knew: they don't make them like they used to.

Naturally, no two people will ever agree on such a list. They were not far off on a lot of their picks, but some titles just don't belong there, and other very deserving films are omitted.

These are some of the titles from their list which I agree with completely:

Casablanca
Chinatown
Double Indemnity
Dr. Strangelove
Lawrence of Arabia
Schindler's List
Shawshank Redemption
Vertigo

But these films don't merit inclusion:

Alien
Blue Velvet
Breathless
Die Hard
Do the Right Thing
Enter the Dragon
The Exorcist
Goldfinger
The Graduate
Groundhog Day
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
National Lampoon's Animal House
Princess Mononoke
Terminator 2
Titanic
When Harry Met Sally
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

But where was "North by Northwest", Hitchcock's film which set the bar for the mystery adventure comedy?

And why was "A Witness for the Prosecution", one of the all-time great courtroom drama mysteries, not included.

"Laura" is a definitive film in the hardboiled detective genre.

Other films which deserve inclusion more than those listed above are:

The Adventures of Robin Hood
The Big Sleep
Notorious
Dial "M" for Murder
Taxi Driver
Rebecca
Pan's Labyrinth

In Memory

If I were the devil...

I would gain control of the most powerful nation in the world;

I would delude their minds into thinking that they had come from man's effort, instead of God's blessings;

I would promote an attitude of loving things and using people, instead of the other way around;

I would dupe entire states into relying on gambling for their state revenue;

I would convince people that character is not an issue when it comes to leadership;

I would make it legal to take the life of unborn babies;

I would make it socially acceptable to take one's own life, and invent machines to make it convenient;

I would cheapen human life as much as possible so that the life of animals are valued more than human beings;

I would take God out of the schools, where even the mention of His name was grounds for a lawsuit;

I would come up with drugs that sedate the mind and target the young, and I would get sports heroes to advertise them;

I would get control of the media, so that every night I could pollute the mind of every family member for my agenda;

I would attack the family, the backbone of any nation.

I would make divorce acceptable and easy, even fashionable. If the family crumbles, so does the nation;

I would compel people to express their most depraved fantasies on canvas and movie screens, and I would call it art;

I would convince the world that people are born homosexuals, and that their lifestyles should be accepted and marveled;

I would convince the people that right and wrong are determined by a few who call themselves authorities and refer to their agenda as politically correct;

I would persuade people that the church is irrelevant and out of date, and the Bible is for the naive;

I would dull the minds of Christians, and make them believe that prayer is not important, and that faithfulness and obedience are optional;

If I were the devil, I guess I would leave things pretty much the way they are.

By Paul Harvey
August 16, 1999

Introducing Obama Inc

Read news the way the mainstream media wouldn't dare to tell it: not factual but entirely true. Introducing Obama Inc.

More fractals

Several people asked about the fractal I posted last week, so I'll post a few more, even though this is somewhat off topic for this blog. These are images of the Mandelbrot Set, which is a generating function involving imaginary numbers. It just takes a few lines of code to generate the image, but the detail in the image is limitless. This means that you can zoom in on one portion of the image and find more detail. My program allows the user to select a rectangle with the mouse, and then zooms in on that rectangle. Here is the top level of the Mandelbrot Set.


Here are other views, zoomed in closely to different parts of the Mandelbrot Set. Remember that you can click on any image to see it in full resolution.























If anyone would like to try this program out, I'll give you a copy. It's kind of fun in a geeky sort of way.

Fiscal responsibilty?

BO's staged "Summit on Fiscal Responsibility" and his whining about the deficit he "inherited" from President Bush are losing more credibility every day. The irony of claiming to follow a "pay as you go" policy days after signing a $787 billion pork spending bill that will still be accruing interest when our grandkids are footing the bill was overshadowed when BO proposed a budget with a $1.75 trillion deficit.

For Democrats and other mathematically challenged in-duh-viduals, that is a quadrupling of the previous record deficit. In a single year the government will go $5,800 further into debt for every man, woman, and child in America, making BO the most reckless money waster in history. If he wants to waste his own money, I'm fine with that, but he is wasting our future and the futures of generations not even born yet.

BO proposes a myriad of tax increases to go along with his spending binge. He admits that these taxes will not pay for everything he wants to spend, which is not surprising. According to CBO figures, even if he taxed 100% of all income over $75,000 it would not pay for all of his spending proposals.

I'm sure you were relived to hear that only people earning more than $250,000 would be affected by BO's tax hike. If I doubled my income tomorrow I wouldn't be close to that, and unlike the President I cannot confiscate other people's earnings by fiat. But these 2% of the highest earners in America who BO loves to demonize are the people who make our economy work. They already pay more taxes than the remaining 98% of us put together. They own businesses and invest in wealth-creating enterprises which create jobs and generate prosperity that benefits everyone.

If you think that BO's massive tax grab will not affect you, think again. His budget includes a mammoth energy tax, which he estimates will generate $650 billion. Do you drive a car? Ride in a bus, train or airplane? Do you use electricity? Do you rely on natural gas to heat your home? Do you buy groceries? This tax will hit you hard. BO's $13 per week tax cut won't go far to offset the $1.30/gallon jump in gas prices or the doubling of your electric bill.

Another horrendous proposal is eliminating itemized deductions for those evil people who earn more than $250k. Those same people who create most of the jobs and prosperity in this country and pay most of the taxes also give more to charity than anyone else. Private charity groups who work in our communities and around the world to help people in need will be pounded mercilessly by this tax hike, and it won't be the rich who are punished, as BO suggests. The United Way, March of Dimes, Feed the Children, Salvation Army, American Cancer Society, World Vision, and hundreds of others will see contributions plummet. I believe that this is entirely intentional, as BO wants to be the sole benevolent benefactor with as many people as possible dependent on him for their subsistence.

The most insidious tax of all is being levied on us all right now, without any legislation passed by Congress or signed by the President. It is a tax on the value of our currency. In the past few months, the US Treasury has fired up the printing presses to a record rate and flooded the economy with money created out of thin air. The money supply, which had been growing at a fairly steady rate of six or seven percent a year for decades, was nearly tripled in just a few months, and even more is on the way to pay for more bailouts and the porkulus bill. With three times as much money chasing the same amount of available goods and services, rampant inflation is sure to set in as soon as people start spending money again. Right now, people are fearfully hoarding money, due in large part to BO's gloom and doom rhetoric and dire predictions of the catastrophe awaiting is we don't immediately rush his harebrained agenda through which is destroying what shreds of consumer confidence were left. This demagoguery ensures that the economy will not recover in the short term, which is fine with BO, who wants to take full advantage of the situation to seize as much power as possible and entrench countless new entitlements and government bureaucracies while people are gripped with the urgency of a crisis mentality. But when all of the newly created money starts to move again, inflation will hammer the purchasing power of your savings and income. This hidden tax will hit everyone, not just the evil rich people. In fact, those people who are having trouble affording the basic necessities right now will feel the effects the most, when the price for food, clothing, electricity, gas, and rent all skyrocket.

Is this the change people voted for? If BO had campaigned on a platform of quadrupling the deficit, taxing the life out of private charity, sending energy costs sky high, and decimating the value of the dollar, would he have been elected? BO is betting his Presidency, his re-election, and his legacy on big government socialism. History says that is a losing bet.

My rotary phone won't dial that site

I'm gonna dial up the VP's web site as soon as I get my modem hooked up to my TV.
Maybe we should get Al Gore, the inventor of the internet to help with this.

The Skeleton in my Closet

Everyone has their own skeleton in the closet. You know what I am talking about. It's that dark secret from your past that you hope to take to the grave with you. It is the horrific event from your past you would never tell even your closest friends, because you are sure they would recoil in disgust and never speak to you again. It is the thing that they dig up when you decide to run for public office to ruin your chances of being elected.

Everyone has one, and right here on this blog, I am going to share mine with you. I am not really sure why I chose to reveal myself in such a public way. Perhaps I hope that the catharsis will purge my soul of the burden of this awful truth. Maybe I just want to defuse the story so that when the media gets ahold of it, it will not ruin my presidential bid. Or could it be that I hope that you will learn from my tale of woe, and change your ways before it is too late for you.

Consider yourself warned. What follows is of a highly offensive and explicit nature. If you are squeamish, read no further. If you don't wish to have your opinion of me shaken, stop now. You have been warned.

And now, without further ado, the skeleton in my closet, the dark undisclosed secret from my past now brought out into the light, the most shameful episode from the hidden recesses of my memory: I went to high school with two members of the Dixie Chicks.

There. I said it. It is out in the open. I'm not sure which word I am more deeply ashamed of: "Dixie" or "Chicks". Or maybe it is their music. Or perhaps their tendency to insert their foot firmly in their mouth. In any case, if you no longer wish to associate with me, I completely understand. But I feel so much better. They say that confession is good for the soul.

A plan for our future

I was talking to my friend Jim Pannell yesterday, and he had a brilliant idea.

We should split the country in half and give half to the whiny bleeding heart commie pinkos who voted for BO, and give the other half to the real Americans who didn't. We've tried dividing the country north and south, and that didn't work too well, so I think that east and west would work better. We'll give the left half of the country to the lefties. That works out well, because most of them have already gone to California anyway, and they are welcome to it. There are quite a few in New England who will have to move west, but they can deal with it. New Jersey will be deserted, because conservatives sure don't want it.

The left coast can be ruled by BO and all of his czars. He's got a czar for everything, so there should be plenty of czars to go around. We will elect a President and restore the long-lost relic of Constitutional government. Both countries can govern themselves as they see fit. The left coast, which will most likely decide to call themselves "The People's Republic of BO" will soon be owned entirely by the government, and their citizens won't know how badly the government is botching everything because the kids graduating from government schools won't know how to add. They will have no military and no prisons because the government budget will go entirely to socialized medicine, funding abortion, government housing projects, poetry readings, condom distribution in preschool, replacing cars with mule carts, gay pride parades, carbon credits, and racial sensitivity training. Because all of the productive and educated citizens are on the east coast, within a year they will have reverted to a medieval existence.

Meanwhile, the east coast will be called "America" and will revive a lost form of government called a "Democratic Republic" based on a forgotten document, "The Constitution." We will have a low tax rate and a non-intrusive government whose primary purpose is to protect the fundamental rights of its citizens. When criminals notice that America has prisons and an effective legal system, they will all move west. America's citizens, unbridled and free from excessive taxation, over-regulation, and absurd union demands, will flourish with innovation and productivity, as the engine of capitalism creates an abundance of wealth that anyone with ambition and determination can share in. America will have a strong military and will trade freely with any nation that respects human freedom.

After three or four years, America will invade PRBO and take it back. They won' t have a military, electricity, internal combustion engines, the will to fight, or any freedom to defend, so it will require about a dozen guys with BB guns. We will be greeted as liberators.

The Fox and the Hen House

Today when I saw that BO is staging a "Summit" to come up with a plan to achieve fiscal responsibility, I spewed a mouthful of scalding coffee all over my computer terminal.

After all, this is the guy who, just last week, promoted and then signed Nancy Pelosi's massive pork bill spending money we don't have on things we don't need. And this week he is concerned about fiscal responsibility? His claim that we are going to "Pay as we go" was pretty much blown last week.

His game plan is to bring in 75 "experts", primarily Democrat special interest groups and left-wing think tanks, put them in a room, send them off in groups with the assignment of devising a plan to cut the deficit in half in four years. I'm not sure if the baseline for that halving was last year's $450 billion deficit or this year's trillion dollar deficit (and counting).

It all sounded pretty ludicrous until I stopped and pondered exactly what BO is trying to accomplish. You see, when I think about fiscal responsibility, it means that you control spending to live within your means. This is what fiscal responsibility means to conservatives, and it is how most real people must live their lives. We can't spend more than we bring in year after year, or eventually we end up in a lot of trouble. So if we have a deficit, the problem is that we are spending too much money, and the solution is to spend less.

But BO's spending frenzy proves that controlling spending is not what he has in mind here. Liberals have a whole different way of looking at things. If the government is running a deficit, it means that they are not taxing us enough, and the solution is to raise taxes. The idea of reducing spending to balance the budget is heresy to a liberal, whose personal empowerment comes from his ability to take our money and dole it out to those who will ensure that he remains in power.

So the purpose of this contrived political theater is to make an excuse for BO's plan to raise taxes much higher and more broadly than he told us in the campaign. The conclusion that this anti-capitalist crowd of union bosses, environmental wackos, community organizers, gay rights activists, ACORN nuts, left-wing professors, liberal politicians, and fringe think tanks reaches will surely not be that we need to reduce government spending. They will conclude that the only course of action is to raise taxes. And who is the President to disagree. He'll go along with their recommendations. After all, that's what the experts said to do.

Loose lips

Where I work we often have to deal with classified information, which is a big responsibility because the lives of many Americans depends on keeping that information secure. Our briefings instructing us on how to handle such sensitive information stress that we must never confirm or deny any statements from which classified data could be inferred. The fact that such data has been printed in the newspaper is not relevant.

It seems that Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, never got that briefing.

Feinstein answered a reporter's question about the location of our Predator drones by saying, “As I understand it, these are flown out of a Pakistani base.”

Her defense for offering this highly sensitive information was just repeating what she had read in the newspaper. I'm not buying it. First of all, she didn't say "The newspaper said they were flown out of Pakistan." She cited her own understanding, and she is in a position to know for sure. There is a huge difference between making an allegation in a local paper and having the chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence confirm it.

Feinstein's ill-considered blabbermouthing didn't go over well in Pakistan. “The Drones Are Here!” proclaimed the Pakistan Daily Times. This places Islamabad in an uncomfortable situation, though the government issued a swift and unequivocal denial. Who can blame them?

Fighting an intelligence-based war such as the one in Afghanistan requires a great deal of discretion, and a trusting relationship with friendly nations in the area is critical. In one thoughtless moment, Feinstein blew that trust. Not only will blowing the cover on this operation endanger the cooperation we have gotten from the Zardari government and make Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke's job that much harder, it will also endanger our drones, which are now sure to be a high-priority target for al Qaeda.

The Democrats are showing again that they are simply not ready for prime time in fighting the war on terror.

Fractal

Several years ago I wrote a program to generate Mandelbrot Set fractal images. You can zoom in on any area of the image, revealing infinite complexity. I hadn't looked at it for a long time, but today I was just messing around with it and found this interesting view. No real significance, just here for your viewing pleasure. Click on the picture to see it in full resolution.

In the news

• Police made an arrest in the January murder of Plano resident Sherlock Holmes. When asked what had helped to crack the case, police detective Lt. Watson responded that it was “elementary”.
  
• A bank robber who disguised himself as a woman to hold up a bank last week was arrested. He looks forward to his new notoriety in the prison yard, where he is known as “The Drag Queen Bandit”.
  
• Barack Obama said that “all sides had to compromise” to reconcile the House and Senate versions of his huge pork handout bill. The President cited the $500 per person tax cut which he promised in the campaign as something he had given up. Congress scaled it back to $400. Biting his lip in a fashion reminiscent of BJ Clinton, BO said, “It’s a sacrifice for me, but I’ll just have to live with the fact that for the foreseeable future you’ll all have to keep sending me that hundred dollars a year.”
  
• When two BO appointees were withdrawn for ethical reasons concerning their failure to pay more than a hundred thousand dollars in taxes, reporters asked if another tax cheat, Tim Geithner, would keep his job as head of the IRS. BO responded, “The American people are tired of hearing this same partisan bickering. We need to get back to the important business we came here to do: attacking rich people for failing to pay their fair share.”

Why the outrage?

I got an email from a co-worker about a certain actress who went on an anti-Jesus rant in her Emmy acceptance speech. She said that "A lot of people get up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that nothing had less to do with this award than Jesus." She went on to tell Jesus to "Suck it". The email encouraged Christians to boycott her show.

Now I had never heard of this particular actress or the show for which she won an Emmy, and I wouldn't watch the show even if she had gotten up there and recited the Lord's Prayer, so saying that I am boycotting the show would be pretty pointless. Even so, I don't see any reason to be outraged by what she said. Her statement is no different from what every person on earth, starting with Adam, has said to God.

Every person thinks that their own way is better than God's way. This belief is based on the lie that God's law is intended to deprive us of something good. God's law is based in His love for us and His way results in every blessing. Adam's sin was much deeper than the act of eating a piece of fruit. He was rejecting God's way, which leads to life, and asserting his independence to follow his own way, which leads to pain, destruction, and death. Each one of us has followed in that same pattern, telling God that we don't need Him, we can do better on our own, and He can "Suck it." That act of defiance to God is responsible for all the evil in the world. We can't say that we don't deserve it because we choose it. Blaming God for the consequences of our rebellion against Him makes no sence at all.

The fact is that God would have been completely justified in leaving us to self-destruct, and then say, "I told you so" as we enter eternity seperated from Him. But He didn't. Knowing full well that this actress would look Him in the face and tell him to "Suck it", Jesus, God in human flesh, loved her so much that He gave His life to save her. She has been offered the most precious gift imaginable that she could never deserve or earn, but she rejects His forgiveness and tells Him to "Suck it." Rather than outrage, that makes me incredibly sad for her.