The Law Of The Sea Treaty Is Bad News

Americans despise taxes.  After all, one of the key issues that paved the way for the American Revolution was the unfair taxation that King George III levied against the Colonies.
Now some in the US Senate want to say yes to an international tax.  It would be the first time in history that an international organization would possess taxing authority, and it would amount to billions of American dollars being transferred out of the US Treasury.
The U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, or the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) is the vehicle through which such taxes would be imposed on U.S.-based commercial enterprises.  
The treaty that Reagan refused to sign in 1982 is reappearing once again in the Senate.  The truth is, LOST contains numerous provisions that hurt the U.S. economy at a time when we need more jobs – not fewer.
Under the guise of being for “the good of mankind, ” LOST would obligate the United States to share information and technology in what amounts to global taxes and technology transfer requirements that are really nothing more than an attempt to redistribute U.S. wealth to the Third World.
At the center of these taxes and transfers is the International Seabed Authority (ISA), a Kingston, Jamaica based supra-national governing body established by the treaty for the purpose of redistributing cash and technology from the “developed world” to the “developing world.”
Ceding authority to the ISA would mean that the sovereignty currently held by the U.S. over the natural resources located on large parts of the continental shelf would be lost.  That loss would mean lost revenue for the US government in the form of lost royalties that the U.S. government collects from the production of those resources. According to the U.S. Extended Continental Shelf Task Force, which is currently mapping the continental shelf, the resources there “may be worth billions if not trillions” of dollars.
In case proponents of LOST have not noticed, the US is over $15 trillion in debt, and we still have more than 20 million Americans who can’t find a job. The last thing we need to do redistribute funds from our country to our economic and strategic competitors.
To make matters worse, the US would have no control over how or to whom the taxes and technology would be redistributed.
Undoubtedly funds that rightfully belong to the American taxpayer would be sent to corrupt governmental regimes, make dictators wealthier, and could even be used for activities directed against the United States and our interests.
Under the treaty, the transfer of these funds does not end with nation states.  These royalty revenues would even be extended to “peoples who have not attained full independence or other self-governing status.”  That means groups like the Palestinian Authority and potentially other groups with terrorist ties.
Proponents of the treaty will claim that the technology transfer portion of the treaty has been significantly changed.  In truth, nations with mining and resource recovery technologies like the United States will be obligated to share those technologies with Third World competitors, and that is one of the many issues, which trouble those of us opposed to the treaty.
In other words, US companies would be forced to give away the very types of innovation that historically have made our nation a world leader while fueling our economic engine.
Under the best of US economic circumstances, the Senate should say no to such an egregious breach of the trust Americans have placed in us. Our current economic struggles are all the more reason to say no to a treaty that is all cost and no benefit.

Nicely Said.....

"This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper."- T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

Obama Will Not Win Re-election

It is time to call the 2012 election.  President Obama cannot win.  He will likely lose big, in a very lopsided election.  Pundits will claim to be surprised when the outcome becomes apparent.  They should not be, as the signs of such a result are everywhere, despite the mainstream media's attempts to suppress them.
There are numerous reasons why Obama will lose.  Incompetence, likeability, and duplicity are a few.  Obama has alienated too many in the electorate, including large numbers who supported him the first time.  In 2012, many will vote against him or (even better) just stay home.
How Did Obama Get Elected the First Time?
Barack Hussein Obama is a self-created myth, polished further by David Axelrod and a compliant media.  He is a chameleon who takes on whatever shape and form best suit his purposes and goals.  There is little substance behind the façade other than an Elmer Gantry style of politics.  He is completely malleable into whatever form and shape best serve his personal interests.
A few examples of this "flexibility" are the following:

• He changed his name when he believed it served him to do so.
• He is not a religious man, but he joined a Black Liberation Church to sell his bona fides to the black community in his early days in Chicago.
• He said that preacher Jeremiah Wright was like his father yet threw him under the bus when it became convenient (necessary).
• He claimed to have been born in Kenya in order to enhance book sales as a younger man.
• He likely lied on his applications to college to gain foreign student status.  At the time, that category provided more favorable admission and funding treatment than afforded domestic blacks.
• He claimed to be a constitutional professor when he was neither a professor nor particularly well-versed in the Constitution.

Little was known about Obama when he entered the primary campaign.  He became little more than a complex Rorschach blot with a sanitized past carefully scrubbed and scripted.  His campaign avoided specifics; his speeches contained no substance.  The imagination of observers defined him.
His greatest asset was his "unknownness."  As a blank slate, voters imagined whatever they wanted in the next president.  They were aided by a clever marketing campaign which emphasized his uniqueness:
As a political "newbie" and the first serious African-American candidate, he played well.  He was an outsider who would clean up Washington.  For many, he was the great healer who would bring unity to Republicans and Democrats, blacks and whites and America and its enemies.  His Kumbayah campaign was hailed by the media, and a large, naive segment of the electorate believed it.
Why Obama Will Lose the Election
Why Obama will lose this next election is less difficult to understand than how he won the first time.  Barack Obama was a fluke, an unlikely candidate with no demonstrated experience in anything other than reading a teleprompter and sounding good.
He was pushed to his party's nomination as a result of the media.  His election was a quirk, rather than something earned.  Any Democrat who gained the nomination was likely ensured the presidency.  Bush fatigue and the hapless John McCain made that almost certain.
Obama will lose the next election because his greatest asset, his unknownness, exists no longer.  Voter imagination can no longer be manipulated in the presence of facts.  Quite simply, Obama will not be re-elected because too many people now know him.  His biggest attribute has been taken away.
What people got was nothing like what they were promised or imagined.  What was a blank slate upon which to imagine an Obama presidency now is a full-blown portrait filled with failure, warts, and scars.
Obama's track record is abysmal. Floyd and Mary Beth Brown discussed four of Obama's failures:

• Obama's 825 billion dollar stimulus failed to keep unemployment below 8 percent as promised. Since President Obama's stimulus passed, America has lost 1.1 million jobs. If you count people who have become discouraged and are no longer seeking jobs, some economists believe that real unemployment rate is above twenty percent.
• Obama called his health care package one of his major accomplishments. He told CBS' Steve Kroft he was "putting in place a system in which we're going to start lowering health care costs." Yet it has failed to make health insurance more affordable. According to the fact watchdog website FactCheck.org, ObamaCare is actually making health care "less affordable." Workers paid an average of $132 more for family coverage just this year.
• Obama predicted his investments in green energy would create 5 million jobs, but the Wall Street Journal reports: "The green jobs subsidy story gets more embarrassing by the day. Three years ago President Obama promised that by the end of the decade, America would have five million green jobs, but so far, some $90 billion in government spending has delivered very few."
• Obama pledged to cut the deficit in half, saying: "And that's why today I'm pledging to cut the deficit we inherited by half by the end of my first term in office." Even if every part of Obama's deficit reduction proposal was enacted, the deficit at the end of his first term would still be $1.33 trillion, more than twice what he promised.

In addition:

• His Obamacare legislation, despite all the state propaganda supporting it, remains unpopular and is viewed by more than half the country as unconstitutional.  Recent hearings in front of the Supreme Court were embarrassing to the administration.  The legislation is wildly over-budget and threatens to accelerate the bankruptcy of the nation.  Further, the more people begin to deal with its implementation, the more unworkable it is considered and the more it is considered a mistake.  Obama's trophy piece of legislation is increasingly viewed as an unworkable, unmitigated disaster.
• Relations between Republicans and Democrats and blacks and whites are worse than at any time in my lifetime.  The former is on evidence every day.  The latter has been emphasized with the circus surrounding the tragic death of Trayvon Martin.
• The country's foreign policy is a growing embarrassment.  America has alienated many of its allies.  America and its enemies are not doing so well, either.  We don't have a Cold War, although we don't need one with what is happening.  Russia is not our ally.  China is exerting its newly developed muscle.  Iran openly mocks the president as it proceeds to nuclear weaponry.  North Korea plays Lucy with the football, and Charlie Brown falls for the trick every time.  The Mid-East is in shambles, with the Arab Spring being nothing more than the replacement of tyrants who were friendly to the U.S. with tyrants who are not.  Israel looks like it will have to act alone against its existential threat.
• The economy has not improved despite record stimulus.  Economic statistics are routinely "massaged" to make outcomes look better.  Suffocating regulations, increasing debt levels and regime uncertainty prevent recovery.  Capital and talent increasingly flee the U.S.
• Obama has mortgaged the country's future with his spending.  By the time of the election, he will have added almost $6 trillion in new debt.  There is no interest in cutting spending despite the doomsday warnings from multiple sources.  Markets will eventually choose how and when the spending will cease.  It will be at the convenience of markets when matters cease.  Likely this timing will not be favorable to the country's preferences.
• Gasoline prices are soaring.  The so-called "green energy" initiative has been exposed as corrupt political payoffs that will not produce economic energy for decades, if ever.  Coal is under attack, exploration for oil is unnecessarily restricted, pipelines are stymied, and power plants are closing.  Politically correct politics moves us away from modernity toward the Stone Age.
• Obama is no longer seen as The One -- just, instead, as another scheming Chicago politician.  He is increasingly viewed as arrogant, dishonest, and incompetent.  These are not messianic attributes.  He is just another politician, although more flawed than most.

A great mistake was made in 2008.  That mistake is now blatantly apparent to most voters and most political analysts around the world.  Nothing Obama promised has been accomplished.  Furthermore, much of what he did added to the country's problems.
Even the fawning media and the Democrat establishment recognize his failings, although neither is willing to publicly discuss them.  Democrats should have replaced this defective candidate long ago.  Now is too late.  Democrat sympathizers can only hope that this election does not destroy what remains of the party.  Based on the debacle that was the 2010 election, that fear is not unfounded.  If anything, the mistake that was Obama is better-known now than it was two years ago.
James Taranto pointed out the despair among Democrats and their PR arm, the national press.  In an editorial, he cited several examples of disillusionment.  Howard Portnoy was quoted in the piece stating:

What I believe is happening is that the left is reading the handwriting on the wall and resigning itself to the harsh reality [that] the man they trusted to "fundamentally transform America" is on the verge of being unelected.

Mr. Taranto added his own thoughts to those of the generally liberal pundits:

Not only does Obama's re-election look to be in serious jeopardy, but his presidency has been an almost unmitigated disaster for progressive liberalism, nearly every tenet of which has been revealed to be untenable either practically, politically or both.

This despair was expressed last October.  Things have only worsened since then.
Obama Stumbles Out of the Gate
Several different recent weeks have been described by various pundits as "Obama's worst week yet."  The rate of his decline steepens as the campaign season heats up.
Now the Obama political campaign is seen as being in disarray.  Politico described the early stages of the Obama re-election campaign as follows:

That's the unmistakable reality for Democrats since Obama officially launched his reelection campaign three weeks ago. Obama, not Mitt Romney, is the one with the muddled message -- and the one who often comes across as baldly political. Obama, not Romney, is the one facing blowback from his own party on the central issue of the campaign so far --  Romney'shistory with Bain Capital. And most remarkably, Obama, not Romney, is the one falling behind in fundraising.

Obama's campaign was run so smoothly four years ago that it likely created a false impression on political observers.  The campaign cannot be run the same way again for obvious reasons.  Nor can it run smoothly this time.  There is nothing on which Obama can run on regarding achievements other than the overhyped bin Laden killing.
He looks silly trying to blame Bush for the last four years, although he must make voters believe that he had nothing to do with the failures.  Perhaps he should blame even earlier presidents for his woes.  After all, Madison and Jefferson provided the Constitution, which he considers a roadblock in his attempts to remake America.
A Bigger Democrat Problem
There is a bigger problem for Democrats than one election and a failed candidate.  The strategy adopted long ago and responsible for most of their success over the last eighty years has played itself out, and they are left with nothing.
Franklin Roosevelt, during the Great Depression, saw the value of buying votes by spreading benefits around.  It was successful and a strategy refined by other Democrats over the years.  It was based on identity politics that focused on certain segments of the population and won them over with "gifts."
It was a strategy of winning elections rather than a strategy of governance, and it was therefore very successful in winning elections, but not so in governing. The Democrat coalition is a motley collection of interest groups with nothing in common other than "we want more."  That makes it impossible to have a coherent governing strategy.
Some are amazed that Democrats have not developed a budget for almost three years.  It really is impossible to do so without offending their coalition.  In a time of monetary constraint, they cannot afford to show who will benefit at the expense of others.  That is just an example of how governance becomes impossible with an election strategy based on Santa Claus.
Now the country is near its Thatcher point, where there is no more money to buy votes and goodies will eventually be taken away rather than increased.  This condition has serious implications for both political parties, but especially for the Democrats.  The Democratic Party now exists and survives for one simple reason -- making dependency more attractive.  It has become the party of plunder, taking from the productive and giving to the unproductive in an attempt to buy enough votes to remain relevant. 
The party approaches this election as an ogre driving an ice cream truck with no ice cream in it.  Democratas will lose this election and will lose many more unless they redefine themselves in terms of something other than Santa Claus.  Sadly, for Democrats (and some Republicans), Santa is dead.
Qualification
My projection of Obama's defeat is based on some semblance of sanity among the electorate.  H.L. Mencken might consider that a dangerous assumption, but I am still hopeful.  However, if Obama wins, get the hell out of Dodge!  Even if the election is close and he loses, leave if you are less than fifty years old and have any ambition and ability.  If the election is even close, the country is lost!               [SOC.Ed~ We here at Sound Of Cannons do not heartily agree with this author.  We're hopeful that America can wake up and realize the bad turn we chose in 2008; but one thing you can say about a vast majority of Americans are that they ARE DUMB.  Intellectual ferocity has never been a hallmark of the American culture.  Our government run schools pump out millions of semi-functional idiots every year.  We think in 2008 it represented the tipping point where the truly mentally inferior outnumbered the thinkers of our once great land; hence socialism gained it's foothold.  The GOP seems content to allow Mr. Soetoro to win the next election and will probably continue putting up sub-par candidates as long as they're firmly in 2nd place.  We have hopes, but we're not dumb enough to bank on them.  The inter-office 2012 Presidential election poll has a realistic Obama -54%  Romney -44%  Ron Paul -2%   We'll see if that changes] 

Professor Soetoro Wasn't Really A Professor

"Professor" Obama, like so many of the other Obamas, is a fraud.
Law Professor Steven Carter shakes his disapproving finger and sets Governor Romney and the rest of us straight: "If you think President Obama has bad ideas, say so. If you want to criticize his record, go ahead[.] ... [But] please don't drag the faculty lounge into it. Leave that space free for our serious, uncensored arguments. Our democracy will be the better for it." (Emphasis mine.)
Professor Carter is so determined to enlighten us that he even accepts the inappropriate term "faculty lounge" rather than the more accurate "faculty club" for the purposes of his piece.  Faculty lounge is what Romney, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and other skeptics have popularized as shorthand for Cloistered Cloud Cuckoo Land of Tendentious Theoretical Speculation in the Academy, and which many opponents now view as the source of Obama's and his apparatchiks' malignantly misguided policies.  (Faculty lounges proper are usually dingy holes reminiscent of car dealer service department waiting rooms.  These are found in elementary and secondary schools, while in colleges and universities "lounges" are generally reserved for graduate students, teaching assistants, and the growing corps of  adjunct cheap labor.  "The Club" is the usual "space" for the kind of elevated clash of titanic tenured professorial intellects that Carter romanticizes, and in many of them the ambiance and fare are well above lounge standards.)
Carter, while disapproving, is generous in allowing that we come by our ignorance honestly.  Citing every frustrated American would-be philosopher-king's favorite inspirational text, Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), he explains that everyday American slugs are practically predestined to undervalue the peregrinations of the elevated minds among us -- to, as Carter puts it, "disdain" the highly educated, because of our "supposition that the dominance of the intellectual is undemocratic."  This attitude is particularly unproductive, Carter believes, because in the "principles" of the faculty lounge (club) lie the salvation of our grubby politics: "[t]he principles of the faculty lounge at its best include tolerance of disagreement, preference for reason over authority, and avoidance of slogan and emotional appeal. These are the principles that those of us who teach (and, one hopes, all adults) should model for our students, and encourage them to carry with them into the world beyond the groves of academe. The better we do our work, the better our politics will be."
One is tempted to ask where Carter has been the last twenty years.  The degeneration of so much of the academy into rigid orthodoxy and intolerance, all the while failing in its most rudimentary functions; ever-increasing numbers of debt-ridden young Americans; and their disillusioned parents is a story that does not need to be recounted here.  Enough simply to say that the "work" of colleges and universities has not been done very well at all -- although through gaming the rating systems, a higher proportion than ever before of American colleges and universities are now labeled highly competitive.  We need look no farther than the sorry tale of "Cherokee Elizabeth" Warren to understand the cynicism and hypocrisy which render contemporary higher education in the aggregate just another dodgy crony in the Brave New Land of Hope and Change.
It is not the gap between Carter's claims for the contemporary academy and its true state that renders his piece worthy of comment -- that dichotomy is commonplace.  Rather, the piece needs to be seen as one among several lines of spin aimed ultimately at both restoring President Obama's luster as the most singular man ever to put his feet up on White House furniture, and at the same time explain his falling so short of almost every mark.  The story goes something like this: Obama is a prodigious intellect, possibly even above the job of chief executive.  He therefore cannot be judged by normal presidential standards.  His mind soars in a higher reality, one we don't know and one, in fact, that makes us uncomfortable.  Here is where Carter comes in.  Carter and others would like us to identify Obama as one of those incandescent academic minds whom they are at pains to tell us Americans just don't appreciate.  We therefore ought to just leave this messianic figure to go about his father's business and count ourselves lucky.  The problem is, in spite of every effort to conceal Obama's academic reality, the story is out: Obama is no more a brilliant intellectual than he is a brave and resolute warrior.  "Professor" Obama, like so many of the other Obamas, is a fraud.
The problem for Obama's apologists is there are some brilliant minds in the academy, and some of us have been lucky enough, or if one ever had to face them in a seminar or dissertation defense, terrified enough, to have encountered them.  One of these, a University of Chicago Law School colleague of Obama's, has in several interviews outed our philosopher-king's pretensions.  Richard Epstein does not need me to describe his quality; anyone who wants a glimpse of him in action needs merely to view a talk he gave, including fielding audience questions, broadcast on C-SPAN earlier this year.  Compare for yourself a sample of the genuine article and any press conference or interview by our professor manqué of a president.  As Epstein tells it to Edward Klein, author of The Amateur:

At the time ... Obama saw himself as a genuine intellectual, which he definitely was not. His course was very popular and he was an engaging teacher, but not one with a serious academic set of interests. The members of the faculty reserved a round table for ten in the Quadrangle Club, where we had lunch and engaged in an intense intellectual exchange. We had a no-sports and no-politics rule and a single topic rule. Everybody bashed everybody. You put yourself once more into the breach and prepared to have the guillotine come down on your head. But Barack Obama never attended these lunches. I firmly believe that this systematic withdrawal from engagement with other members of the faculty stemmed from him not wanting to put himself at intellectual risk. (P. 21.)

The Obama campaign's days of telling us that what looks like bad news is really good news that we are just too dumb to comprehend are drawing to a close.  Next they are going to try to convince us that Obama may not be a genius after all, but he can connect emotionally with us a lot better than that stiff Romney, and that is now what matters.

Nicely Said......

"Legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on. All these plans as a whole—with their common aim of legal plunder—constitute socialism.

But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime."

~Frederic Bastiat

Lessons from The Laffer Curve in the 1920s

What happened to tax revenues collected in the 1920s following a "tax cut" in the top marginal income tax rate from 73% to 24%? They went up, not down.

Thomas Sowell discusses the relationship between tax rates and tax revenues.

"Democrats have been having a field day with the cry of "tax cuts for the rich" — for which Republicans seem to have no reply. This is especially surprising, because Democrats made the same arguments back in the 1920s, and the Republicans then not only had a reply, but one that eventually carried the day, when the top tax rate was brought down from 73 percent to 24 percent (see chart above).

Those who argue that "the rich" should pay a higher tax rate, and that the revenue this would bring in could be used to reduce the deficit, assume that higher tax rates equal higher tax revenues. But they do not.

After Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon finally succeeded in getting Congress to lower the top tax rate from 73 percent to 24 percent, the government actually received more tax revenues at the lower rate than it had at the higher rate. Moreover, it received a higher proportion of all income taxes from the top income earners than before.

Something similar happened in later years, after tax rates were cut under Presidents Kennedy, Reagan and G.W. Bush. The record is clear. Barack Obama admitted during the 2008 election campaign that he understood that raising tax rates does not necessarily mean raising tax revenues.

Why then is he pushing so hard for higher tax rates on "the rich" this election year? Because class warfare politics can increase votes for his reelection, even if it raises no more tax revenues for the government."

MP: Part of the confusion about the relationship between tax rates and tax revenues comes about because we use the terms "raise taxes" to mean both "raise tax rates" and "raise tax revenues" interchangeably (e.g. "raise taxes on the rich"). In reality, "raising tax rates" could result in either "raising tax revenues" or "lowering tax revenues." Most of the discussion about "raising (or lowering) taxes" leaves out the most critical factor: the "tax base, i.e. the activity subject to be taxed," and its changes in the tax base that ultimately determine the relationship between "tax rates" and "tax revenues."

In the case of lowering the top marginal income tax rate from 73% to 24% in the 1920s, the "tax base" expanded so much in response to the lower tax rate that tax revenues actually increased, not decreased. In other words, history tells us that the way to impose a "tax hike on the rich" is to lower, not raise, the tax rate. Lower tax rates increase the incentives to engage in productive, taxable activities and increase the incentives to report instead of hide or shift, taxable income, and therefore raise tax revenues.

With marginal tax rates scheduled to increase next year, the lessons of history also tell us that the tax revenues collected next year will go down, not up. Reason? The tax base of activity subject to the higher tax rates will contract so much that the tax revenue collected will shrink, not expand. Next year's "tax hikes on the rich" will likely end up being a "tax cut" in revenues, and will make the budget deficit worse. 

It's Time to Ditch the College-for-All Crusade

Excerpts from Robert Samuelson's editorial in today's Washington Post (emphasis mine):

"The college-for-all crusade has outlived its usefulness. Time to ditch it. Like the crusade to make all Americans homeowners, it’s now doing more harm than good. It looms as the largest mistake in educational policy since World War II, even though higher education’s expansion also ranks as one of America’s great postwar triumphs.

 Consider. In 1940, fewer than 5 percent of Americans had a college degree. Going to college was “a privilege reserved for the brightest or the most affluent” high-school graduates, wrote Diane Ravitch in her history of U.S. education, “The Troubled Crusade.” No more. At last count, roughly 40 percent of Americans had some sort of college degree: about 30 percent a bachelor’s degree from a four-year institution; the rest associate degrees from community colleges.

 Starting with the GI Bill in 1944, governments at all levels promoted college. From 1947 to 1980, enrollments jumped from 2.3 million to 12.1 million.  College became the ticket to the middle class, the be-all-and-end-all of K-12 education.  If you didn’t go to college, you’d failed. Improving “access” — having more students go to college — drove public policy.
We overdid it. The obsessive faith in college has backfired.

For starters, we’ve dumbed down college. The easiest way to enroll and retain more students is to lower requirements. Even so, dropout rates are high; at four-year schools, fewer than 60 percent of freshmen graduate within six years. Many others aren’t learning much.

The real concern is the quality of graduates at all levels. The fixation on college-going, justified in the early postwar decades, stigmatizes those who don’t go to college and minimizes their needs for more vocational skills. It cheapens the value of a college degree and spawns the delusion that only the degree — not the skills and knowledge behind it — matters. We need to rethink."

MP: The chart above shows graphically the results of the "college-for-all crusade."  In the 1970s and 1980s only about one out of three high school graduates went on to college.  Now about half of all high school graduates attend college.  And most of them now graduate with student loan debt of $25,000 and many are having a hard time finding a job.