Our oldest grandson was involved in the Jaguar Super Bowl ad. The above is not it but you can go to Jaguar.com and watch it by clicking on: " View Global Website."
It was the first Super Bowl ad by Jaguar. It rated quite high and was subsequently shown and discussed on Fox News!
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This economist told us neither to trust Obama health care projections nor the ones from CBO. (See 1 below.)
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Is Churchill going to have the last laugh? (See 2 below.)
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Iran's Navy is on their way! (See 3 below.)
America losing its will vis a vis Iran? (See 3a below.)
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Dick
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1)
The Economist Who Exposed ObamaCare
The Chicago professor examined the law's incentives for the poor not to get a job or work harder, and this week Beltway budgeteers agreed.
By Joseph Rago
In September, two weeks before the Affordable Care Act was due to launch, President Obama declared that "there's no serious evidence that the law . . . is holding back economic growth." As for repealing ObamaCare, he added, "That's not an agenda for economic growth. You're not going to meet an economist who says that that's a number-one priority in terms of boosting growth and jobs in this country—at least not a serious economist."
In a way, Mr. Obama had a point: "Never met him," says economist Casey Mulligan. If the unfamiliarity is mutual, the confusion is all presidential. Mr. Mulligan studies how government choices influence the incentives and rewards for work—and many more people may recognize the University of Chicago professor as a serious economist after this week. That's because, more than anyone, Mr. Mulligan is responsible for the still-raging furor over the Congressional Budget Office's conclusion that ObamaCare will, in fact, harm growth and jobs.
Rarely are political tempers so raw over an 11-page appendix to a dense budget projection for the next decade. But then the CBO—Congress's official fiscal scorekeeper, widely revered by Democrats and Republicans alike as the gold standard of economic analysis—reported that by 2024 the equivalent of 2.5 million Americans who were otherwise willing and able to work before ObamaCare will work less or not at all as a result of ObamaCare.
As the CBO admits, that's a "substantially larger" and "considerably higher" subtraction to the labor force than the mere 800,000 the budget office estimated in 2010. The overall level of labor will fall by 1.5% to 2% over the decade, the CBO figures.
Mr. Mulligan's empirical research puts the best estimate of the contraction at 3%. The CBO still has some of the economics wrong, he said in a phone interview Thursday, "but, boy, it's a lot better to be off by a factor of two than a factor of six."
The CBO's intellectual conversion is all the more notable for accepting Mr. Mulligan's premise, which is that what economists call "implicit marginal tax rates" in ObamaCare make work less financially valuable for lower-income Americans. Because the insurance subsidies are tied to income and phase out as cash wages rise, some people will have the incentive to remain poorer in order to continue capturing higher benefits. Another way of putting it is that taking away benefits has the same effect as a direct tax, so lower-income workers are discouraged from climbing the income ladder by working harder, logging extra hours, taking a promotion or investing in their future earnings through job training or education.
The CBO works in mysterious ways, but its commentary and a footnote suggest that two National Bureau of Economic Research papers Mr. Mulligan published last August were "roughly" the most important drivers of this revision to its model. In short, the CBO has pulled this economist's arguments and analysis from the fringes to center of the health-care debate.
For his part, Mr. Mulligan declines to take too much credit. "I'm not an expert in that town, Washington," he says, "but I showed them my work and I know they listened, carefully."
At a February 2013 hearing he pointed out several discrepancies between the CBO's marginal-tax-rate work and its health-care work, and, he says, "That couldn't persist forever. There would have to be a time where they would reconcile those two approaches somehow." More to the point, "I knew eventually it would be acknowledged that when you pay people for being low income you are going to have more low-income people."
Mr. Mulligan thinks the CBO deserves particular credit for learning and then revising the old 800,000 number, not least because so many liberals cited it to dispute the claims of ObamaCare's critics. The new finding might have prompted a debate about the marginal tax rates confronting the poor, but—well, it didn't.
Instead, liberals have turned to claiming that ObamaCare's missing workers will be a gift to society. Since employers aren't cutting jobs per se through layoffs or hourly take-backs, people are merely choosing rationally to supply less labor. Thanks to ObamaCare, we're told, Americans can finally quit the salt mines and blacking factories and retire early, or spend more time with the children, or become artists.
Mr. Mulligan reserves particular scorn for the economists making this "eliminated from the drudgery of labor market" argument, which he views as a form of trahison des clercs. "I don't know what their intentions are," he says, choosing his words carefully, "but it looks like they're trying to leverage the lack of economic education in their audience by making these sorts of points."
A job, Mr. Mulligan explains, "is a transaction between buyers and sellers. When a transaction doesn't happen, it doesn't happen. We know that it doesn't matter on which side of the market you put the disincentives, the results are the same. . . . In this case you're putting an implicit tax on work for households, and employers aren't willing to compensate the households enough so they'll still work." Jobs can be destroyed by sellers (workers) as much as buyers (businesses).
He adds: "I can understand something like cigarettes and people believe that there's too much smoking, so we put a tax on cigarettes, so people smoke less, and we say that's a good thing. OK. But are we saying we were working too much before? Is that the new argument? I mean make up your mind. We've been complaining for six years now that there's not enough work being done. . . . Even before the recession there was too little work in the economy. Now all of a sudden we wake up and say we're glad that people are working less? We're pursuing our dreams?"
The larger betrayal, Mr. Mulligan argues, is that the same economists now praising the great shrinking workforce used to claim that ObamaCare would expand the labor market.
He points to a 2011 letter organized by Harvard's David Cutler and the University of Chicago's Harold Pollack, signed by dozens of left-leaning economists including Nobel laureates, stating "our strong conclusion" that ObamaCare will strengthen the economy and create 250,000 to 400,000 jobs annually. (Mr. Cutler has since qualified and walked back some of his claims.)
"Why didn't they say, no, we didn't mean the labor market's going to get bigger. We mean it's going to get smaller in a good way," Mr. Mulligan wonders. "I'm unhappy with that, to be honest, as an American, as an economist. Those kind of conclusions are tarnishing the field of economics, which is a great, maybe the greatest, field. They're sure not making it look good by doing stuff like that."
Mr. Mulligan's investigation into the Affordable Care Act builds on his earlier work studying the 2009 Recovery and Reinvestment Act, aka the stimulus.
The Keynesian economists who dominate Mr. Obama's Washington are preoccupied by demand, and their explanation for persistently high post-recession unemployment is weak demand for goods and thus demand for labor. Mr. Mulligan, by contrast, studies the supply of labor and attributes the state of the economy in large part to the expansion of the entitlement and welfare state, such as the surge in food stamps, unemployment benefits, Medicaid and other safety-net programs. As these benefits were enriched and extended to more people by the stimulus, he argues in his 2012 book "The Redistribution Recession," they were responsible for about half the drop in work hours since 2007, and possibly more.
The nearby chart tracks marginal tax rates over time for nonelderly household heads and spouses with median earnings. This index is a population-weighted average over various ages, jobs, employment decisions like full-time versus part-time. Basically, the chart shows the extra taxes paid and government benefits foregone as a result of earning an extra dollar of income.
The stimulus caused a spike in marginal rates, but at least it was temporary. ObamaCare will bring them permanently into the 47% range, or seven percentage points higher than in early 2007. Mr. Mulligan says the main response to his calculations is that people "didn't realize the cumulative effect of these things together as a package to discourage work."
Mr. Mulligan is uncomfortable speculating about whether the benefits of this shift outweigh the costs. Perhaps the public was willing to trade market efficiency for more income security after the 2008 crisis. "As an economist I can't argue with that," he says. "The thing that I argue with is the denial that there is a trade-off. I argue with the denial that if you pay unemployed people you're going to get more unemployed people. There are consequences of that. That doesn't mean the consequences aren't worth paying. But you can't deny the consequences for the labor market."
One major risk is slower economic growth over time as people leave the workforce and contribute less to national prosperity. Another is that social programs with high marginal rates end up perpetuating the problems they're supposed to be alleviating.
So amid the current wave of liberal ObamaCare denial about these realities, how did Mr. Mulligan end up conducting such "unconventional" research?
"Unconventional?" he asks with more than a little disbelief. "It's not unconventional at all. The critique I get is that it's not complicated enough."
Well, then how come the CBO's adoption of his insights is causing such a ruckus?
"I would phrase the question a little differently," Mr. Mulligan responds, "which is: Why didn't conventional economic analysis make its way to Washington? Why was I the only delivery boy? Why wasn't there a laundry list?" The charitable explanation, he says, is that there was "a general lack of awareness" and economists simply didn't realize everything that government was doing to undermine incentives for work. "You have to dig into it and see it," he explains. "The Affordable Care Act's not going to come and shake you out of your bed and say, 'Look what's in me.' "
Judging by their reaction to the CBO report, the less charitable explanation is that liberals would have preferred that the public never found out.
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One of the first acts of Barack Obama's presidency was to send back to Britain a powerful Oval Office sculpture of Winston Churchill, looking beetle-browed and determined, the way Churchill really looked when he was defying Hitler.
At the time, Obama's gesture seemed another little eccentric footnote to this extremist administration. After all, Obama's Dreams from My Father celebrates his biological father who abandoned him as a baby, to return to Kenya after the terrorist Mau Mau Jono Kenyatta came to power. Obama Sr. soon fell out with Kenyatta, was purged from the regime, and managed to have two consecutive drunk driving accidents, the second of which killed him.
In the real post-colonial world, Obama's Leninist ideology is completely passé. India's Prime Minister Singh is a free market economist. Over there, English is still the language of politics and commerce, and free market policies have created a sustained economic boom. China is no longer rigidly Marxist either, and it is booming using free market principles. The real talents of individuals in India and China now have a greater chance to flourish. In Russia, Putin has introduced a 14% flat tax, and is boosting traditional morality. Only Obama still harbors that old post-colonial rage against white imperialists, which is why he can't tell the difference between murderous terror gangs and democratic revolutions. Iran is ruled by a corrupt and evil priesthood, opposed by hundreds of thousand of young people who look to the civilized world for hope. After Obama's Geneva Surrender we know that he honestly can't tell the difference between reactionary murder regimes and modern peoples.
For civilized people Al Qaeda is a mass child-murdering criminal gang, a horrific throwback to a dark and bloody past. Photos of AQ's slaughtering innocent children, women old people in the Syrian Christian village of Maloula have gone viral all over the web. The mall massacres in Nairobi, Kenya showed a primitive murder gang head-chopping black and white Africans alike, and those pictures were flashed around the world as well. Normal human beings of all faiths were terribly shocked, including many civilized Muslims.
But for Obama Al Qaeda is just like the Mau Mau terror group, who beat the British in Kenya by slaughtering white farm families in acts of horrific terror.
Obama truly is not like us; his beliefs are utterly alien to our political tradition.
That is why this administration violates all the rules. It is not an accident. It is simply who they are.
The act of sending the bust of Churchill back to Britain signaled Obama's hatred for the Anglo-American political tradition, including the US Constitution. So far only one prominent liberal has expressed open outrage -- Nat Hentoff, the civil liberties advocate who used to write for the Village Voice.
Obama's recent Geneva Surrender to the primitive Mullahcracy is still being seen by millions of dope-addled American airheads as the road to peace. So what if the Saudis are terrified about Iranian nuclear weapons that are now within the grasp of the mass-murdering mullahs? So what if Israel is now surrounded by 170,000 missiles in the Iranian Crescent? So what if the Geneva Surrender was instantly violated by Russia breaking the sanctions against Iran?
The media won't tell you this, but that solemn seven-power "peace" agreement broke down within days. John Kerry is now insisting on dismembering Jerusalem and the West Bank as a sop to please the worst totalitarians, an exact copy of the Surrender to Hitler that started World War Two. The nuclear horse is out of the barn, after sixty years of successful American efforts to thwart nuclear proliferation to mad regimes. Obama has welcomed Iran to big power nuclear status in the Middle East. The libs call this "diplomacy" but it is abject surrender to evil.
The Saudis remember that Ayatollah Khomeini tried to overthrow their regime during the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, the hajj. They know the mullahs want to control Mecca and Medina, and thereby run the entire Sunni world, 80% of Islam. Arab-Persian hatred is ancient and enduring.
Obama's little spiteful act of returning the bust of Churchill signaled this whole administration's gangster approach to governance. Winston Churchill, for all of his human faults, was still the greatest defender of civilized values against Nazi and Stalinist tyranny.
Fortunately Churchill spoke prophetically about tyrant-appeasers like Obama and Kerry. We have his prophetic words when Prime Minister Chamberlain came back from the Munich Surrender:
"You were given the choice between war and dishonour.You chose dishonour, and you will have war."
One tick of history later and Hitler invaded Poland in alliance with Stalin.
Against the consistent advice of our best military officers, Obama has surrendered -- and surrendered to the most radical and fanatical mass murdering regimes in the Middle East. For five years the United States had an open window of opportunity to set back the Iranian nuclear program with minimal risk -- just the way we stopped Saddam from developing his nuclear program, using sanctions and a no-fly zone. Now that window of action has slammed shut.
Obama took no action. He lied and delayed and lied and delayed -- telling Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the civilized world that "Iran would never be allowed to get nuclear weapons."
If you want to see who won that confrontation, just look at the laughter on the faces of the mullahs today. They look drunk from their victory. Mullah Rouhani can't stop laughing.
Obama is a malignant narcissist, and therefore dangerous. The Democratic Party, which has known all about Obama for years, must have known about his openly confessed radical Leninist ideology. Today senior Democrats are leaving Congress for fear of the voters' revenge. They know exactly what they have done, just as Ted Kennedy knew how to undermine our borders and immigration laws during his decades in the US Senate.
These people act with malice aforethought. That is why they are allied with the Muslim Brotherhood, and maybe the Iranians as well.
Maybe there will be a miracle that spares the world from another major war. We all hope so. But if Obama's arrogant fiasco comes tumbling down and war does break out in the Middle East, conservatives must remind America of Churchill's prophecy of 1938 and Obama's dishonor.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------3)Iran Sends Warships to US Maritime Borders
Senior Iranian Navy commanders announced on Saturday that the country has sent several fleets of warships to the US maritime borders.
"The Iranian Army's naval fleets have already started their voyage towards
the Atlantic Ocean via the waters near South Africa," Commander of Iran's
Northern Navy Fleet Admiral Afshin Rezayee Haddad announced on Saturday.
The admiral, who is also the commander of the Iranian Army's 4th Naval Zone
said, "Iran's military fleet is approaching the United States' maritime
borders, and this move has a message."
In September 2012, Iran's Navy Commander Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari
reiterated Iran's plans for sailing off the US coasts to counter the US
presence in its waters in the Persian Gulf.
Sayyari had earlier informed of Tehran's plans to send its naval forces to
the Atlantic to deploy along the US marine borders, and in September 2012 he
said that this would happen "in the next few years".
The plan is part of Iran's response to Washington's beefed up naval presence
in the Persian Gulf. The US Navy's 5th fleet is based in Bahrain - across
the Persian Gulf from Iran - and the US has conducted two major maritime war
games in the last two years.
In September 2011, Sayyari had announced that the country planned to move
vessels into the Atlantic Ocean to start a naval buildup "near maritime
borders of the United States".
"Like the arrogant powers that are present near our maritime borders, we
will also have a powerful presence close to the American marine borders,"
Sayyari said.
Speaking at a ceremony marking the 31st anniversary of the start of the
1980-1988 war with Iraq, Sayyari gave no details of when such a deployment
could happen or the number or type of vessels to be used.
Sayyari had first announced in July, 2011 that Iran was going to send "a
flotilla into the Atlantic".
The Iranian navy has been developing its presence in international waters
since 2010, regularly launching vessels in the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of
Aden to protect Iranian ships from Somali pirates operating in the area.
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3a)The War of Wills Between U.S. and Iran
By Christopher Griffin
Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper warned Congress last Tuesday that Iran's technical progress toward building missile-deliverable nuclear weapons "makes the central issue its political will to do so." President Obama issued his own warning that evening, telling Congress that he would veto legislation imposing new sanctions if Iran continues its nuclear program. Although Obama promised that he will be "the first to call for more sanctions and stand ready to exercise all options" if diplomacy fails, the United States is quickly losing ground in its contest of wills with Tehran.
Under the Joint Plan of Action announced in November 2013, Iran is committed to only a tactical pause at the nuclear threshold, no more than two months away from a nuclear weapon. A recent report found that even if Tehran irreversibly dismantled 80 percent of its 19,000 installed centrifuges as part of a final agreement, Tehran could still be just six months away from the bomb. For his part, Iranian President HassanRouhani has rejected even these lenient terms, declaring that Iran will not dismantle any of its centrifuges "under any circumstances."
The interim deal has also allowed Iran to catch its breath from crippling international sanctions. Ignoring the U.S. position that "Tehran is not open for business," Iran hosted more trade delegations during the first two weeks of 2014 than all last year, and its economy is showingmarked signs of recovery. As both Iranian and European negotiators propose extending the interim period envisioned by the Joint Plan of Action, Tehran's leaders are confident that they can bank on at least a year to erode sanctions.
Iran is cashing in on its growing prestige. In the months since the Joint Plan of Action was announced, Iran has developed more capable next-generation centrifuges to enrich uranium, worked with its proxy Hezbollah to smuggle anti-ship missiles into Lebanon, continued its support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's war against the Syrian people, and attempted smuggling weapons to militants in Bahrain.
As Iran's leaders prepare for the next round of talks, American diplomatic missteps risk bolstering their confidence as much as the lenient terms of the interim deal.
Iran is fully engaged in Syria, where President Obama's 2013 "red line" debacle over Bashar al-Assad's chemical weapons attacks has come full circle. It is now clear that Assad will neither meet the deadlines set in the U.S.-Russian plan for destroying his chemical weapons, nor relent from his slaughter of Syrian civilians. While even Secretary of State John Kerry has reportedly admitted that U.S. policy is failing in Syria, the administration has not articulated any meaningful response toAssad's rope-a-dope strategy toward Washington's diplomatic outreach.
Tehran can also see Washington's tepid response to Russia's apparent violation of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty by flight testing a new ground-launched cruise missile. The White House has avoided publicly acknowledging this violation of a keystone arms control agreement for fear of jeopardizing future talks to reduce nuclear arms with Russia - talks that the Russians have already rejected.
As long as Iran believes that the White House values diplomatic process over real-world outcomes, there is little reason for it to believe that Obama has the political will to "exercise all options to make sure Iran does not build a nuclear weapon."
The American critics of this failing policy must develop their own plan of action, committed to rolling back Iran's nuclear program.
Advocates of a sane Iran policy must continue to work for what Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) has described as a "diplomatic insurance policy" in case Iran refuses to dismantle its nuclear program. In December 2013, Senator Menendez and Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL) introduced the Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act of 2013, which would impose harsh new sanctions in the event that Iran either violates the interim nuclear deal's terms or does not negotiate in good faith toward a comprehensive agreement. Despite the president's veto threat, Iranian intransigence will likely force this bill or similar legislation back onto Congress' agenda again this year.
Congress should also articulate the minimum acceptable terms for a comprehensive agreement. Even if Iran yields from its no-dismantlement position, the United States should not accept a bad deal that leaves Iran just several months from the bomb. One immediate step that Congress can take is to call on the Obama administration to define Iran's "practical needs" for a civil nuclear program, and why uranium enrichment is as uneconomical for Iran as it is dangerous for the world.
It is also necessary to highlight Iran's flaunting of its commitments under the interim agreement and continued provocations throughout the Middle East and abroad. The IAEA's quarterly reports on Iran this year will detail Tehran's nuclear activity between the conclusion of the Joint Plan of Action in November 2013 and the agreement's implementation on January 20, as well as the continued growth of its 3.5 percent enriched uranium stockpile.
Finally, we must reverse the defense cuts that are harming U.S. military capabilities. If the United States cannot meet commitments to vital allies or afford to conduct military operations, no warning to Iran about "all options" being on the table will be credible. This danger was previewed during the summer 2013 debate over Syria, when the Pentagon warned that budget cuts and reduced readiness were a serious concern.
The United States has a long way to go to make up for lost ground in its standoff with Tehran, but the road ahead will be navigable if the current policy's critics pursue a comprehensive agenda to break Iran's will to get a nuclear weapon.
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