Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Mark Steyn wants the West to have some kids.
… The problem with the advanced West is not that it’s broke but that it’s old and barren. Which explains why it’s broke. Take Greece, which has now become the most convenient shorthand for sovereign insolvency – “America’s heading for the same fate as Greece if we don’t change course,” etc. So Greece has a spending problem, a revenue problem, something along those lines, right? At a superficial level, yes. But the underlying issue is more primal: It has one of the lowest fertility rates on the planet. In Greece, 100 grandparents have 42 grandchildren – i.e., the family tree is upside down. In a social democratic state where workers in “hazardous” professions (such as, er, hairdressing) retire at 50, there aren’t enough young people around to pay for your three-decade retirement. And there are unlikely ever to be again.
Look at it another way: Banks are a mechanism by which old people with capital lend to young people with energy and ideas. The Western world has now inverted the concept. If 100 geezers run up a bazillion dollars’ worth of debt, is it likely that 42 youngsters will ever be able to pay it off? As Angela Merkel pointed out in 2009, for Germany an Obama-sized stimulus was out of the question simply because its foreign creditors know there are not enough young Germans around ever to repay it. The Continent’s economic “powerhouse” has the highest proportion of childless women in Europe: one in three fräulein have checked out of the motherhood business entirely. “Germany’s working-age population is likely to decrease 30 percent over the next few decades,” says Steffen Kröhnert of the Berlin Institute for Population Development. “Rural areas will see a massive population decline, and some villages will simply disappear.” …
Andrew Malcolm hopes Iraq’s leaders don’t work like ours.
The politicians in Baghdad have in their own way been working hard at this democracy business, especially hard now that most U.S. troops are gone.
Iraq’s leaders have no doubt been monitoring CNN International in recent days as the needless payroll tax extension fight in that exotic place called Washington was settled, fell apart and now both houses of Congress have packed up without any agreement. As if another legislative month off was more important than the nation’s struggling economy.
They see this Democrat Harry Reid fellow saying no, absolutely no way will he name Senate conferees to work together with Republicans on a year-long tax cut extension, which he really wants, until the House passes a two-month extension, which Reid only says he wants. So, Reid the petulant politician closes the Senate.
And Iraqi leaders see the U.S. House not even voting on the two-month extension because its newest members want a year-long extension like everybody else and they also feel like needling their own sect leader a bit. So, they waste a vote demanding that the other chamber do what everyone knows it’s not going to do.
And they see the president of the United States, who wanted a year-long extension until he thought he got Republicans in a PR bind over two months, jabbering only at the GOP about its extraneous demands. …
AutoBlog tells how some union thugs got jailed.
Danny Douglas and Jay Campbell, have been sentenced to 18 months and 12 months plus one day, respectively, after being convicted of extortion. It seems the two former United Auto Workers officials agreed to end an 87-day strike at a GM plant in Pontiac, MI back in 1997 – but only after General Motors agreed to hire Campbell’s son and the son of another UAW official for high-paying jobs they were evidently not qualified for.
It’s been a rather long and winding road for Douglas and Campbell. According to the Detroit Free Press, the case first went to trial in 2002, and in 2003, the charges were dismissed by U.S. District Judge Nancy Edmunds. Shortly thereafter, a trio of judges from the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision and reinstated the charges.
The maximum penalty allowed for the pair of law breakers – both are now 70 years old – was up to 30 years in prison and fines of $750,000. Judge Edmunds, however, sentenced them much less strictly, with six months of house arrest and two years of probation. Both Douglas and Campbell appealed the ruling, and the case went back to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.
That was apparently a bad move on their part. Their convictions were upheld and the Sixth Circuit actually sent the case back to Judge Edmunds, ruling that her sentences were too lenient. So now, it’s off to prison for Douglas and Campbell.
OC Register editorial with a good example of why California is headed to the dumps.
Democratic reaction to the news that Waste Connections, a $3.6-billion company and major Sacramento-area employer, is headed to Houston to seek a friendlier business climate tells other businesses all they need to know about the attitudes of those who run California’s government.
State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, gave these clueless and snarky remarks in response to the news: “In this instance you have a company that is, in fact, profitable, making significant revenue gains in 2011 and 2010. That doesn’t speak to a bad business climate here in California when a good company is able to thrive in that way. So whatever Mr. Middelstaedt’s (company CEO) reasons are to leave the great state of California, I know I’m pushing back.”
Steinberg claims to have worked on improving the state’s business climate, but from what we see in Sacramento, Steinberg and the party he helps lead have been pushing hard mainly for additional regulations and much higher taxes. The California Democratic Party’s attitude long has been that businesses are basically trying to rip off the public, and the source of all wealth and advancement can be found in the public sector, When businesses leave. Steinberg and Co. show little sympathy. …
Joel Kotkin says the rest of the sun belt is doing just fine.
Along with the oft-pronounced, desperately wished for death of the suburbs, no demographic narrative thrills the mainstream news media more than the decline of the Sun Belt, the country’s southern rim extending from the Carolinas to California. Since the housing bubble collapse in 2007, commentators have heralded “the end of the Sun Belt boom.”
Yet this assertion is largely exaggerated, particularly since the big brass buckle in the middle of the Sun Belt, Texas, has thrived throughout the recession. California, of course, has done far worse, but its slow population growth and harsh regulatory environment align it more with the Northeast than with its sunny neighbors.
Moreover, the Sun Belt is poised for a recovery, according to the most recent economic and demographic data. Even such hard-hit states as Arizona appear to be making an unexpected, and largely unheralded, recovery.
Take Florida. The Sunshine State may have experienced rapid population loss during 2008 and 2009, but the just-released 2011 Census estimates show a remarkable turnaround, with the state adding 119,000 domestic migrants last year. This may be less than half the gains in 2004 and 2005, when the in-migration reached nearly 250,000, but it is close to levels enjoyed a decade ago.
The big winners in terms of growth were in the South, with Texas, Florida and North Carolina as the leading in-migration states. Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia also ranked in the top 10. …
WSJ Editors say the SEC case against Fannie and Freddie execs provides some interesting and timely information.
Democrats have spent years arguing that private lenders created the housing boom and bust, and that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac merely came along for the ride. This was always a politically convenient fiction, and now thanks to the unlikely source of the Securities and Exchange Commission we have a trail of evidence showing how the failed mortgage giants turbocharged the crisis.
That’s the story revealed Friday by the SEC’s civil lawsuits against six former Fannie and Freddie executives, including a pair of CEOs. The SEC says the companies defrauded investors because they “knew and approved of misleading statements” about Fan and Fred’s exposure to subprime loans, and it chronicles their push to expand the business.
The executives deny the charges, and we hope they don’t settle. The case deserves to play out in court, so Americans can see in detail how Fan and Fred were central to the bubble. The lawsuits themselves, combined with information admitted as true by Fan and Fred in civil nonprosecution agreements with the SEC, are certainly illuminating.
The Beltway story of the crisis claims that Congress’s affordable housing mandates had nothing to do with it. But the SEC’s lawsuit shows that Fannie degraded its underwriting standards to increase its market share in subprime loans. According to the SEC suit, for instance, in 2006 Fannie Mae adjusted its widely used automated underwriting system, “Desktop Underwriter.” Fannie did so as part of its “Say Yes” strategy to “provide more ‘approve’ messages . . . for larger volumes of loans with lower FICO [credit] scores and higher LTVs [loan-to-value] than previously permitted.” …