The Final Five: June 14, 2012

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Tonight's Crazy Story:
Dot.everything: New Internet Domains Include '.cool,' '.apple,' '.love'
Imagine visiting a humor website that ends in '.lol'. Anyone willing to pay a $185,000 application fee, along with $25,000 per year, can now register a 'dot-something' internet domain.

Topic One: Education
Two interesting articles attacking some of the main arguments liberals make for improving education. First, The Blaze's Meredith Jessup asks whether or not we need more teachers: "public school enrollment has minimally increased over the last few decades, but teacher employment has exploded — the public school workforce has grown 11 times faster than student enrollment over the last 40 years. And how does employing more and more teachers affect our students’ performance? While the cost of education has steadily risen, academic scores have remained stagnate and in some cases actually declined. As Cato’s Andrew Coulson notes, if the U.S. returned to the student-to-staff ratio we had in 1970, we could save $210 billion… every year. Furthermore, on a per pupil basis, the inflation-adjusted average cost of a K-12 education has gone from about $55,000 to about $150,000."

Second, Terrence Jeffrey argues at CNSNews that increasing the school year will only result in more indoctrination: "The inherent nature and learning potential of American children have not changed since then. But our society has. Today, public schools think they have better things to do than make children learn the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic by sitting them in a seat and teaching it to them. Many parents think they have better things to do than parent their own children. Parents who like the idea of a government-run school keeping their child in class until 5:00 p.m. every day and incarcerating them in school 12 months a year are not looking for an education so much as a full-time, taxpayer-funded babysitting service. Public school teachers are not going to get any better at teaching children that 3 times 3 is 9 and that cat is spelled c-a-t if they get nearly full-time custody of American children. What they will have is more time to indoctrinate kids into their way of looking at life."

Time for a Laugh:
"President Obama is coming to Chicago this weekend. Obama is introducing his new economic plan as part of the Just For Laughs Festival."
-Conan O'Brien

Topic Two: Misplaced Emphasis
Richard Epstein argues that the individual mandate is not the worst part of ObamaCare: "Right now the entire nation is on tenterhooks about the constitutional challenge to the individual mandate that is the most conspicuous feature of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“ACA”). On this occasion, however, I do not wish to talk about the constitutional challenges to the ACA now before the Court. Rather, I want to take a moment to say that the greatest benefit we could get from striking down the individual mandate does not concern the mandate proper, but the huge set of misguided institutions that it props up."

"The ACA is a classic illustration of placing a persuasive title on a controversial statute to conceal its deep internal weaknesses. There is no way that one can “protect patients” by restricting, either through private employers or public exchanges, the choices they have in the type of plans they can join. It would be impossible for the statute to make health care more affordable when it piles major mandates on private plans, which could make them too costly to operate at all."

"Measured against these epic concerns, the individual mandate is one of the least offensive provisions contained in the statute. To backtrack a moment, the mandate was included in the legislation as a way to offset the high costs associated with providing universal coverage for all Americans. It quickly became apparent that this program could only work if the statute built in extensive cross subsidies, whereby the young paid for a larger fraction of the health care benefits of the elderly, and the healthy paid much of the cost of care for those in poor health."

Debt Watch:
$15,735,182,423,771.72
( As of Wednesday, June 13, 2012 )

Change: -$9,178,276,293
Your share as a citizen: $50,322.29
Share per household: $137,742.77
Debt since Obama inauguration: $5,108,305,374,859

Topic Three: Deficit Spending
Improvement in tax revenue are helping to reduce the deficit: "The federal budget deficit is approaching $1 trillion for a fourth straight year even though the government is collecting more tax revenue than last year. The Treasury Department said Tuesday that the deficit grew by $124.6 billion in May. That put the deficit through the first eight months of the budget year at $844.5 billion, or 8.9 percent below last year's imbalance for the same period."

The problem is that this reduction in the deficit is coming primarily from an increase in tax collections and not a reduction in spending. As Ronald Reagan said, "We don't have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven't taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much." An increase in revenues is good if it is coming from growth and not from higher tax rates, but we cannot expect to balance the budgets without cutting spending.

Complicating this problem is that we are standing on the edge of a fiscal cliff (with ballooning deficits in addition to the so-called 'taxmageddon'), and we have no leader: "On January 1, 2013, America careens off a fiscal cliff. The largest tax increase in the country's history goes into effect. Spending on defense, Medicare, and other vital areas will be cut indiscriminately. And, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the fiscal cliff may well push the economy back into recession. One would think that as president, Barack Obama might feel some small concern over the prospect of economic calamity. But so far, there's been nothing. No suggestion on how to remedy the problem, no moves toward bipartisanship, not a single measure set forth to avoid the looming tax increases and indiscriminate cuts. Nothing. Instead, the president acts like the fiscal cliff is none of his concern."

Tweet of the Day:
Frank J. Fleming (@IMAO_): "I'm just going to play golf stay out of everyone's way." -economic speech from alternate universe Obama who did learn his lesson

Topic Four: Lower Taxes Create Growth
Diana Furchtgott-Roth makes the case that lowering tax rates is the way to stimulate growth: "Raising taxes, whether to take effect in 2013 or 2014, would be the wrong way to help America recover from the recession, because higher taxes cramp economic growth."

"The Romers, both professors at the University of California (Berkeley) entitled their paper "The Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Changes: Estimates Based on a New Measure of Fiscal Shocks." The innovative feature of the paper is to distinguish between the effects of tax changes arising from legislation and those tax changes that occur automatically as rising income lifts individuals into higher tax brackets."

"After looking at data from 1947 to 2006, and studying the legislative record behind the tax changes, the Romers concluded that legislated tax changes have far more effect than automatic tax increases. They write, "Our estimates suggest that a tax increase of 1% of GDP reduces output over the next three years by 3%." A major reason is that higher taxes have a markedly negative effect on investment."

"Mr. Obama: Heed your own economic adviser."

"In another finding that argues against raising rates, Arizona State University Nobel Prize-winning economist Edward Prescott has shown that the higher the tax rates, the lower are the hours of work. In highly-taxed France, for example, people on average worked only three-fourths of the American workweek. In the early 1970s, when American tax rates were higher, the French worked more than the Americans. Mr. Prescott's results also hold for countries as diverse as Japan, Chile, and Italy."

Food for Thought - A Quote from our Founders
"This is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of society is reduced to mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering."
-Thomas Jefferson

Topic Five: The Frugality Myth
Steve Chapman covers the myth of Obama's frugal spending claims: "When White House press secretary Jay Carney stood up in front of reporters and said, "Do not buy into the B.S. that you hear about spending and fiscal constraint with regard to this administration," I naturally assumed someone would come out with a hook and drag him away before sending him on a long vacation to recover from whatever was addling his mind."

"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread, and Carney's attempt at celebrating the administration's budget record -- not excusing, mind you, but celebrating -- amounted to climbing the fence into the lion enclosure at the zoo."

"When you're running a deficit of over a trillion dollars for the fourth consecutive year, prudence counsels that you stay as far away from the subject as possible, rather than seek out opportunities to impale yourself on it. Yet even the president has been boasting of his restraint."

Tomorrow in History
June 15, 1775 - George Washington is appointed as the commander-in-chief of the Continental Army.

Grab Bag - Interesting and Important Stories to Conclude Your Evening:
Infographic: The hidden costs of the farm bill

The tiny island with a huge web presence

What if a lawmaker refuses to leave after losing an election?

Reid pushing for boxing legislation

The next NYC bans: popcorn and milkshakes

Senate rejects food stamp reform

The nation of takers

4.8 billion people have a mobile phone, 4.2 billion have a toothbrush

Only three in ten teens have a summer job

Occupy doesn't like having its wealth redistributed

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