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Charles Krauthammer explains the application of Stein’s Law to Detroit. And then to the country.
If there’s an iron rule in economics, it is Stein’s Law (named after Herb, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers): “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”
Detroit, for example, can no longer go on borrowing, spending, raising taxes and dangerously cutting such essential services as street lighting and police protection. So it stops. It goes bust.
Cause of death? Corruption, both legal and illegal, plus a classic case of reactionary liberalism in which the governing Democrats — there’s been no Republican mayor in half a century — simply refused to adapt to the straitened economic circumstances that followed the post-World War II auto boom.
Corruption of the criminal sort was legendary. The former mayor currently serving time engaged in a breathtaking range of fraud, extortion and racketeering. And he didn’t act alone. The legal corruption was the cozy symbiosis of Democratic politicians and powerful unions, especially the public-sector unions that gave money to elect the politicians who negotiated their contracts — with wildly unsustainable health and pension benefits.
When our great industrial competitors were digging out from the rubble of World War II, Detroit’s automakers ruled the world. Their imagined sense of inherent superiority bred complacency. Management grew increasingly bureaucratic and inflexible. Unions felt entitled to the extraordinary wages, benefits and work rules they’d bargained for in the fat years. In time, they all found themselves being overtaken by more efficient, more adaptable, more hungry foreign producers. …
Naomi Riley with more on the unintended consequences of student debt.
‘Help Jenna join the Convent!” A number of friends posted the link from fund-raising site YouCaring.com to Facebook, so I clicked. Jenna Andrews, it turns out, is a 30-year-old Catholic convert who’s trying to join the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne this fall. The Westchester-based order is devoted to caring for destitute cancer patients at the end of their lives. But it can’t accept Jenna until she pays off her $32,336 worth of student loans.
This is not a scam, folks. Last year, Georgetown’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate reported that a lot of seminary candidates are “too poor to take the vow of poverty”: Many religious institutions are rejecting candidates who have too much educational debt.
With undergraduate and, in some cases, divinity-degree debt multiplying into the six figures while clergy wages remain relatively low, it’s easy to understand why seminaries can’t bless this kind of borrowing.
Of course, it’s not just the religious being sent off course by student loans. Young people across America are putting off marriage and starting a family because they’re so weighed down by the collective $1 trillion in accumulated student debt. …
Noemie Emery says the racial grievance industry is getting old.
After the bombings at the Boston Marathon on April 15, a columnist at Salon expressed his wish for a Caucasian villain, and he did get his wish — not a blond, blue-eyed Nazi or Bull Connor wannabe, but a Chechen from the actual Caucasus, an immigrant, and a Muslim, and the deflation was visible.
After Gates-gate, when Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested and handcuffed in his own home by a white policeman James Crowley, whom Obama had said “acted stupidly,” white liberals and the race-grievance industry hoped they had found their Bull Connor wannabe, and were again disappointed.
And when George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin in Florida, they hoped again they had found a Germanic villain — and instead found a Hispanic, from a mixed racial background, with black ancestors, and who tutored black children.
In the face of all this, they became ultra-creative, with the New York Times calling Zimmerman a “white Hispanic,” a term they may have coined for this occasion, and NBC News doctored a tape to make him sound like a racist, for which it is facing an imminent lawsuit, which every sane person should hope it will lose.
The grievance industry complains about profiling, but it seems to do this itself without reservation, making the sizeable leap from prejudice — meaning “pre-judging” — to putting thoughts into other men’s heads. …
And Bill O’Reilly challenges Jerry Rivers to find a black leader who will address the problem of the disintegration of black families.
On Geraldo’s radio program today I told him to let me know when President Obama holds a press conference about the disintegration of the African-American family. I also asked Geraldo when a seminar on the damage hip hop and rap is doing to unsupervised children will be held by Sharpton and Jackson. I’m looking forward to that.
Perhaps at that seminar more positive entertainment might be encouraged and maybe an exposure like that would encourage President Obama not to invite people like Jay-Z to the White House when he is putting out dubious material that children are absorbing.
And finally I told Geraldo that I feel sorry for black kids who don’t have fathers and who were born into poverty because their mothers become impregnated at a young age without any resources. It is America’s shame and all politicians are responsible somewhat that we have not discouraged the astronomical out-of-wedlock birth rate in this country.
As we stated early this week that drives poverty, that drives crime. And that’s what’s causing the massive chaos in many black American precincts. …
The Examiner with the story you can’t make up. Federal employees want to make sure they’re not covered by obamacare.
National Taxpayer Employee Union officials are giving members a form letter expressing concern…
IRS employees have a prominent role in Obamacare, but their union wants no part of the law.
National Treasury Employees Union officials are urging members to write their congressional representatives in opposition to receiving coverage through President Obama’s health care law. …
Pickerhead was thinking of ignoring the whole Weiner mess, but the cartoons were too good. As a way of introducing them we have a post from Roger Simon on the Dem’s war against women.
… Hillary Clinton has, more than anyone I can think of, led our culture to where it is now.
We all remember well Hillary in high dudgeon blaming her husband’s (serial, she knew well) adultery on the “vast right-wing conspiracy.” What kind of person does that? How disconnected is that from reality — how narcissistic, selfish and, well, sociopathic?
This is the same Hillary Clinton who told the father of fallen Benghazi SEAL Tyrone Woods — at his son’s funeral — that they were going to get that obscure and hapless filmmaker who made the dopey anti-Islam video, when all along she knew Tyrone and the others were the victims of an al-Qaeda-related terror attack. The word “entitlement” cannot encompass that behavior.
And she was, maybe still is, the mentor of Huma Abedin. The mind, as they say, boggles. And Huma, of course, is the daughter of a leader of the fundamentalist Muslim Sisterhood.
I cannot even begin to draw all the connections there. Maybe I don’t even want to know. Besides, Andy McCarthy has done it better than I ever could.
But one connection I will draw — the way Democratic liberals treat women is the same way they treat blacks… as coolies.