Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal had a front page article about those with arrest records are finding it increasingly difficult to find a job in the current economy.  It reminded me of a tweet I put out last week, that government’s role in society is to create criminals our of ordinary people.

Aren’t we supposed to be the most compassionate country on earth? How about a little forgive and forget for our fellow man? Let’s start with Wally Camis Jr.

One petitioner is Wally Camis Jr., who wanted to clear the air about the time he threatened two men with a hairbrush.

Mr. Camis was hungry for work amid a divorce last fall. The 41-year-old Air Force veteran, who had worked as a security guard and owned a restaurant, filled out an application for temporary employment in Eugene, Ore., checking a box saying he had never been arrested.

When he followed up a week later, the temp agency told him no thanks — they’d turned up a 1986 conviction. Stunned, Mr. Camis recalled the night the two men threatened him and he pulled a silver brush from his back pocket, saying it was a knife. He called the police, he says, and later pleaded guilty to aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, a misdemeanor. The judge entered a “no judgment” finding and ordered Mr. Camis to pay a $60 fine.

“I thought that was the end of it,” he says.

Instead, 22 years later, Mr. Camis found himself fighting to erase traces of the arrest, joining the growing ranks of Americans who hope that clearing their records of minor crimes will boost their odds in a tough job market. To help, entrepreneurs have set up record-clearing services and local governments have passed laws to speed the expungement process.

So, here is a veteran who served his country being punished because he threatened someone with a hair brush? Are you kidding me? This goes beyond ridiculous, and no one should have to go out of their way to expunge a dumbass ruling in the first place. Oh, how about this next mad man. Surely, he deserves what he has coming.

One Chicago 53-year-old, who has worked for an overnight delivery service and as a bricklayer, is nervous that his record’s sole smudge may come back to haunt him.

In 1974, he says, he was walking down a street near his Chicago home rolling a marijuana cigarette. He was arrested by an undercover police officer and convicted of possession. “That was back in the days when I had hair, and I just said, ‘Forget about it.’ I was like 17 or 18 years old — what did I care?”

His employers never learned of the conviction, he says, nor have his own children. But, hoping to coach high-school basketball when he retires in a few years, he’s working with a Chicago attorney to clear his record. “Nowadays they look for anything so I figured I better take care of this,” he says.

Wow, this guy smoked marijuana when he was 17 or 18. Who knows what he’s liable to do next. I know he’s 53 now, but you never know when those evil ways will return. How about these statistics.

These convictions are increasingly coming to employers’ attention. Background checks have become more commonplace in the years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and cheaper. More than 80% of companies performed such checks in 2006, compared with fewer than 50% in 1998, according to the Society for Human Resource Management, an association of HR professionals.

Millions of Americans are in a similar position. In 1967, 50% of American men had been arrested. Since then, arrests made in connection with domestic violence and illegal drugs have pushed the number to 60%, estimates Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University. The annual number of arrests for possession of marijuana more than tripled to 1.8 million from 1980 to 2007, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Holy sh!t. 60% of American men have been arrested, and then they have to worry about the arrest, which I’m guessing a large chunk are frivolous, coming back and preventing them from being productive and contributive members of society. What in the world are our politicians doing? Maybe we need to change our criminal laws to something similar to the points system used for automobiles. If you commit a “crime” (and crime is debatable in some of these instances), you get points. After a certain period of time, those points are erased off your record. Now, I’m not saying all criminals. There are crimes that we can all agree should not be removed. Most of those would be violent crimes, and I don’t mean threatening someone with a hair brush.

I have an even better idea. If you want to really get this worked out, how about anyone who has been arrested cannot serve in the government anywhere. With 60% of men having an arrest record, I’m guessing many of those are politicians, bureacrats, judgets, police, etc. Maybe seeing the stupidity of criminalizing our society, they will be a little more reasonable when branding someone for life as a criminal.

The house version of the healh care reform bill has fines and jail time for those who refuse to buy health care and pay the new fine. Wonder what that 60% of men will go up to?

As part of the health care reform bill, house Democrats put a new surtax into the bill of 5.4%. This is going to increase the effective capital gains rate by 69%. Capital gains is the tax term used by our government to explain investment income. For example, if you buy a stock at $5 and sell it at $10, you have a capital gain of $5. Now, capital gains also counts real estate investments, and Democrats were talking about repealing the owner occuppied housing exeption in the last election. So potentially, this could effect every American if Democrats get their way in the long run. As we know, anytime government wants more money they just seek out profitable sectors of our economy and decide to tax it. If most American’s have their saving sitting in their houses, surely you will see government eventually targeting that for more revenue.

That surtax takes effect on January 1, 2011, or the day the Bush tax rates of 2001 and 2003 expire. Today’s capital gains tax rate of 15% would bounce back to 20% because of the Bush repeal and then to 25.4% with the surtax. That’s a 69% increase, overnight. The last time investors were hit with anything comparable was 1986, when the capital gains rate jumped to 28% from 20%, a 40% increase, as part of the Reagan tax reform that lowered income tax rates.

The 1986 experience was not a happy one. Tax revenues from capital gains surged before the increase took effect in 1987, as investors moved to cash in at the lower rate. Revenues then plummeted. Total realized capital gains didn’t again reach their 1985 level of $172 billion until 1996. By 1992, the federal government was barely getting more in revenue ($29 billion) at the 28% rate than it did in 1985 ($26.5 billion) at the 20% rate.

Rate reductions, as in 2003 when Republicans cut the rate to 15% from 20%, have typically had the opposite effect. Treasury receipts from capital gains climbed to an estimated $117.8 billion in 2006 from $49 billion in 2002.

via Health-Care Surtax Applies to Capital Gains – WSJ.com.

Ok, so how is this going to effect the stock market? It will definitely hinder the stock market growth. If you are buying and selling stocks, your return will be decreased, which means you are less likely to take the risk. If less people are willing to take the risk, there will be less capital to fund businesses. On top of that, businesses, especially small businessses, have capital gains as well. If their capital gains is taxed more, they are less likely to invest in expanding their business because the investments now become more risky. Businesses look at after tax profits. As the article says, capital gains revenue to the government actually went down after increases in the rate. That means there was less investing and less turner of investment. Capital was held up in the system instead of flowing through the system.

Government is  the land of idiocy. They think we live in a static world where they can say, hey look at all that money. Let’s take some, and for some reason people are going to just say “Oh ok George, here you go.” Reality is much different. People’s behavior changes, and the government does harm to all of us. This increase will hinder our economy, and worst yet, it will destroy more jobs.

In the Wall Street Journal, an op-ed takes Gore to task on his need to continue to see only one side of the global warming debate because he has so much invested in the one side, and all his rewards can only come from one side.

Mr. Gore is quite right that his arguments should be judged on their merits, not on his investments. He’s wrong to think his investments are irrelevant, and, even more, that sincerity is dispositive of anything. Sincerity is no substitute for disinterestedness.

Here are a couple questions: When so much of his position and prestige are invested in a predicted climate crisis, is Mr. Gore likely to be open to contrary evidence? Is he likely to be particularly fastidious about whether proposed steps will actually have an effect on global warming if they also happen to benefit his investments?

Ms. Blackburn’s challenge was in a sense late. Mr. Gore long ago jumped over to the side where salesmanship, by whatever means, was the trumping priority. As far back as 1989, he insisted there was “no dispute worthy of recognition” about the danger of manmade climate change. By now, he titularly heads a vast establishment with a stake in one side of the argument.

Notice, for instance, after a decade in which the earth appears to have stopped warming and even cooled, that global warming advocates have rushed to embrace a computer simulation that predicts this cooling (in retrospect, of course) and allows for indefinite future cooling, even while assuring that the world is destined to face disastrous warming anyway. Isn’t this what forecasters of doom have done since time immemorial when their deadlines for doom haven’t been met?

Mr. Gore’s own predictions of a climate catastrophe have not lessened, but every time he opens his mouth, the costs of meeting the emergency become easier and easier to swallow. They aren’t even costs anymore; as he says in his new book, they are “profits.”

All policy salesmanship naturally defaults toward the proposition of huge benefits and negligible costs (i.e., free lunchism). Isn’t that where Al Gore is today?

Mr. Gore notes that he has poured his own money into two climate action nonprofits, but, whatever his self-felt motives, aren’t these nonprofits functionally propaganda arms (i.e., advertising) that benefit his for-profit investments?

via Holman Jenkins: The Economic Uses of Al Gore – WSJ.com.

Like all used car salesmen, Al Gore has a lot full of junk that needs sold. He’s got all his investments wrapped up in the clunkers. If he can’t sell them, he’s rewards will vanish. So what do all used car salesmen do? They smooth talk you and feed you a line of BS to get you to buy their junky cars. Used car salesmen have to convince every person to buy a car though. Unfortunately for us, Al Gore only needs to convince the morons in Washington. Then they force us to buy.

What’s the fastest way to riches? No, it’s not real estate, Carton Sheets. All, you have to do is get the government to force society to buy your BS. This is what Al Gore has done, and he is now heading towards becoming the first billionaire environmentalist. How did he do it? False advertising.

Manmade climate change is said to present humankind with some of its greatest challenges in the planet’s history, not the least of which is an alarming increase in frequency and intensity of natural disasters. Massive flooding, super-powered hurricanes, endless tornado seasons and more have all been said to be the direst of consequences of global warming.

In his movie “An Inconvenient Truth”, Al Gore famously proclaimed that, “Temperature changes are taking place all over the world and that is causing stronger storms.” Standing with Hurricane Katrina as a backdrop, the former vice president issued a cautionary tale of disaster in the making, all due to our irresponsible handling of the atmosphere. As recently as February Mr. Gore was giving a presentation showing flooding, drought and wildfires saying, “This is creating weather-related disasters that are completely unprecedented.”

President Barack Obama, in a town hall meeting in April echoed the Nobel laureate’s comments saying, “You’re now looking at huge, cataclysmic hurricanes, complete changes in weather patterns.” He followed that in September when in a speech before the United Nations he claimed, “More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent.”

But what if you predicted global natural disaster catastrophes and they didn’t happen? Does that invalidate your entire message? This is the conundrum faced by climate change alarmists as many of their predictions begin to fall flat.

via Predictions of climate change induced natural disasters falling flat.

While most private sector companies would be prosecuted for false advertising, Al Gore just changes his marketing a little and moves forward. I’m sure he’s greasing enough palms in Washington to get away with it. The problem is the people are starting to see through Al Gore’s false stories of man made catastrophe. To believe that man has the power to change the climate is nonsense. We are such tiny factors when you think about the oceans, the sun, cosmic radiation, etc.

Recently, a book, Superfreakonimics, argued that if global warming is real, we don’t have to cut back on our CO2 emmissions. Instead, we could cheaply pump sulfur dioxide into the atomosphere to act as a cooling agent. While thinking about humans minipulating the atomosphere sounds crazy to me, it highlights the lie that Al Gore believes we have to do something. If global warming (now called climate change sinces it’s cooling) is really human created, then the solution posed in the Superfreakonimics book would make sense. Humans could do something to fix it. Al Gore doesn’t buy this though. The authors really don’t either. They are just highlighting that we could fix it cheaper than what Al Gore is proposing if this is the real argument being put out by Gore. Al Gore doesn’t really want a solution as proposed in the book. That doesn’t put money into his pocket. He wants a supposed solution in the form of green technology that doesn’t have to prove itself. That puts money in his pocket, and no one can claim it didn’t work.

Gore himself uses more and more energy everyday with his own private jet, a mansion, and oil to slick his hair back. If he truly believed his own BS, he’d be working out of his house over the internet selling his garbage, but instead he’s travelling the world over wining and dining with the political elite, more than likely on the public dime. So if Al Gore isn’t living up to his own standard, then apparently the standard isn’t worth living up to, and Al Gore has been marketing lies. Anyone have a link to the FTC? I want to submit a false advertising complaint.

While doing some research, I decided to look and see what the S&P 500 was trading at. The average P/E ratio from 1961 through 2008 was 17.79 The height of the dot com bubble reached 35.5. As you can see the current P/E ratio of the S&P 500 is almost 140. You can confirm this on Standard and Poors website. As of this posting, the S&P is trading at 137.98 times earnings. While I’m sure that will come down as companies earnings pick back up, the market appears to be looking for some historical gains in earnings. As I said even in the dot com bubble we were only 25% of where we are currently trading.

While I’m not professional, this sure seems like a lot of people are drinking the economic recovery Kool-aid. I better head over to TradeKing and sell my index fund before the Kool-aid runs out.

The Federal Reserve continues to throw gas on the fire claiming it can pull the gas back out if the fire gets out of control. Good luck.

Rand Paul and Peter Schiff respond to the erroneous claim that inflation is not a problem and that we should really be concerned about deflation. Also, Sean Ryan, a liberty activist from Boston, talks about his confrontations with Barney Frank and the president of the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank.

The Federal Reserve has increased the monetary base to an unprecedented level. If that money works its way through the economy, we will see inflation. Bernanke claims that the Fed can reduce the money supply if necessary, but Rand Paul suspects that if stagflation occurs (high inflation plus a slow economy), the Fed will not be willing to reduce the money supply.

At the root of the problem is the fact that the Federal Reserve claims to control inflation, when it is really the vehicle for inflation.

via Confronting the Myth of Deflation | Wendy Macy’s Blog.

The truth be told.

The typical argument for ObamaCare is that it will offer better medical care for everyone and cost less to do it, but occasionally a supporter lets the mask slip and reveals the real political motivation. So let’s give credit to John Cassidy, part of the left-wing stable at the New Yorker, who wrote last week on its Web site that “it’s important to be clear about what the reform amounts to.”

Mr. Cassidy is more honest than the politicians whose dishonesty he supports. “The U.S. government is making a costly and open-ended commitment,” he writes. “Let’s not pretend that it isn’t a big deal, or that it will be self-financing, or that it will work out exactly as planned. It won’t. What is really unfolding, I suspect, is the scenario that many conservatives feared. The Obama Administration . . . is creating a new entitlement program, which, once established, will be virtually impossible to rescind.”

Why are they doing it? Because, according to Mr. Cassidy, ObamaCare serves the twin goals of “making the United States a more equitable country” and furthering the Democrats’ “political calculus.” In other words, the purpose is to further redistribute income by putting health care further under government control, and in the process making the middle class more dependent on government. As the party of government, Democrats will benefit over the long run.

This explains why Nancy Pelosi is willing to risk the seats of so many Blue Dog Democrats by forcing such an unpopular bill through Congress on a narrow, partisan vote: You have to break a few eggs to make a permanent welfare state. As Mr. Cassidy concludes, “Putting on my amateur historian’s cap, I might even claim that some subterfuge is historically necessary to get great reforms enacted.”

No wonder many Americans are upset. They know they are being lied to about ObamaCare, and they know they are going to be stuck with the bill.

via John Cassidy on ObamaCare – WSJ.com.

The writing is already on the wall. Government is poised to take over health care. The next logical step in controlling the cost of this “public service” will be controlling your eating habits. While I believe that people should pay for their eating habits via increased insurance premiums, I do not believe the government should be telling people what to eat, trying to change the way people eat, or getting involved in people’s eating habits what-so-ever.

Instead of hoping that individuals can muster the self-discipline on their own to avoid processed foods, fast food and days without physical exercise, the idea is that governments must actively work to change environments and reduce the menu of harmful options available in everyday life.

As a result, hundreds of towns in Europe and elsewhere have adopted a version of this strategy, aimed particularly at preventing children from becoming overweight and obese. They hired dietitians to counsel children and their families in schools, organized walk-to-school days, hired sports educators and built new sporting facilities. The U.S. government, meanwhile, is increasing its funding for cities and towns to pursue so-called community-based obesity prevention, in an effort to gather data about which kinds of tactics work best.

“People are finally acknowledging that the obesity problem is so pervasive that it isn’t just because people are making bad choices,” says Laura Kettel Khan, an obesity expert at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which makes grants to states for community obesity-prevention programs.

via New Obesity-Fighting Programs Enlist Entire Towns – WSJ.com.

The free market has a way of dealing with obesity via health insurance premiums. It also would deal with it, if the government would stay out of the free market. The government encourages bad eating habits. It does this by promoting the idea that no one should pay increased insurance costs because of pre-existing conditions, obesity or any other higher risk factor. Once government controls health care, there will be no penalty what-so-ever for bad habits.

Also, the government subsidizes corn more than any other crop which is used in most fattening foods to the tune of almost $10 billion a year. Because corn is so cheap, things like high fructose corn sryup have been developed to make food cheaper. Corn is also used to feed most live stock, which makes live stock cheaper as well. This is why fast food is so cheap. If you remove the government subsidies, corn prices will go up. With corn prices, the cost of some of the worst foods will also increase, which would result in less consumption of those foods.

We are watching the same old sitcom. Government side effects cause or contribute to our societal ills, and the government inserts itself to be our saviors willing to take our freedoms in order to fix our problems. Unfortunately, the people are all too willing to take the government solution.

Government’s role in society is to create criminals out of ordinary people.

Shout out to Hotair for the video

Bob Murphy had a great post,  Free Advice: “The Money That Is Sold Abroad Is You!”, that reiterates my post on selling our kids into slavery. This video is a lot more dramatic though. I’m jealous.