According to the Declaration if Independence, America consists of “Free and Independent States”; 13 originally, 50 today.

Except that the centralized tyranny in Washington, D.C. owns 45.3 percent of the land in California. That’s better than the 84.5 percent in Utah or the 69.1 percent of Alaska.

But it’s much worse than the mere 1.6 percent of Alabama or the 0.4 percent of Connecticut.

The Feds should sell off all that property and use the proceeds to pay down the $15,338,276,445,417.43 national debt. But they won’t. They love enslaving us.

Here’s the chart of the whole country:

Feb. 3, 2012

Hat tip to LewRockwell.com.

I’d rather walk that drive a hybrid car. After bourbon, the internal combustion engine is mankind’s greatest invention. All talk of oil “shortages” and too much “pollution” is just socialist blather used to destroy our freedoms.

But some folks like hybrids. Soon they could be paying a lot more for them thanks to a nutty decision in a California court. Reported the Huffington Post, Heather Peters, on Feb. 2 won “a court decision awarding her $9,867 and finding Honda misled her into thinking her Hybrid could get 50 miles per gallon. She said the 2006 model, which she still owns, gets about 30 mpg.

“Peters’ win in small claims court was a unique end run around the class action process and set the stage for others to follow suit. She sees her victory as benefiting not just Honda owners but all consumers.”

But as was noted by auto journalist Eric Peters (no relation to Heather), Honda and other automakers don’t establish the fuel ratings, the federal government does! Didn’t Heather and the California court know that?

Oh, wait, I forgot. This is California, where dreams are reality, common sense is uncommon and our governor is named Moonbeam.

Lawsuits Galore

Eric Peters writes, “Because while [Heather] Peters’ $9k judgment is small potatoes, the fact that she succeeded could encourage a tsunami of similar court cases that might end up costing Honda (and potentially other hybrid car sellers and so, ultimately, consumers ) a lot more than $9k.

“As Peters (a lawyer) notes, there are at least 200,000 Honda Civic hybrid owners alone. That’s just one make/model of hybrid. There are at least a dozen different hybrid vehicles on the market — and theoretically, the same case could be made against them, too….

“The government (EPA) takes a new car, then runs it through its test loop. Mileage figures are posted on the window sticker based on these tests, which are by nature subjective. Hence the caveat, in plain standard English: Your mileage will vary. Note, not may.

“Will.

“The exact wording is as follows:

“ ‘Your actual mileage will vary depending on how you drive and maintain your vehicle  (italics added).’

“And just under the big ‘best case’ mileage numbers, in smaller type, one finds a range of ‘expected mileage.’ As an example, this week I am test driving a new Fiat 500C. The ‘best case’ number is 32 MPG highway. But underneath this is a range of ‘expected mileage’ between a low of 26 MPG and an even higher high of 38 MPG.

“In other words, your mileage will vary.”

Attacking Honda

According to the Huffington Post, “But Professor Laurie Levenson of Loyola University Law School said Honda may have suffered something much worse than a possible flood of small claims actions.

“‘The worst part for Honda is they’ve been branded as committing fraud’,” she said. “That’s not good for sales. It’s a P.R. disaster and sometimes that costs more than the judgment.”

But it was the federal government that committed the fraud by establishing the Honda’s fuel usage ratings.

And how do we know how Heather Peters drove the car? To do that, you’d have to put a camera behind her head and record how heavy her high heels were stomping down on the accelerator.

Eric Peters again: “Unfortunately for Honda — and potentially every other seller of hybrid cars and perhaps cars, period —  there are a lot of people out there who cannot read and comprehend the meaning of plain English and worse, assume everything the government tells them must be true, since it’s the government that’s telling it to them. Thus, they become angry when reality disabuses them — but unfortunately, they channel their anger toward the wrong party.

“Here is the truth about the Civic hybrid — and all hybrids:

“If you drive it very gingerly, if you keep it under 50 MPH and accelerate very gradually, it is entirely possible to realize the federal government’s publicized ‘high’ MPG figures — and even to exceed them. The problem, of course, is that it is difficult to drive this way if you ever want to get anywhere — and/or have any concern about not driving your fellow drivers to fury by impeding their progress.

“There is also the problem of conditions. They, too, vary.

“A Civic hybrid that does not have to ascend 8 percent grades every day, which is not driven at high altitudes (where the air is thinner) or for months on end in 20 degree weather is going to be easier on gas than a hybrid Civic that is subjected to any one of these conditions, or to all of them. And if, say, you run around on under-inflated tires, or need of a tune-up, then once again, your actual mileage will vary. 

“So, arguably, Peters’ lawsuit was fundamentally wrongheaded — and the judgment, unjust. The court did not even try to determine how she actually drove her car, even though it is a critical piece of evidence. The only question considered was whether her car delivered the advertised mileage – notwithstanding the bold-faced caveat that the advertised mileage is for ‘comparison purposes only’ and that (wait for it) your actual mileage will vary.”

So the whole hybrid thing is another fraud the government has perpetrated upon us. And it’s just going to get worse, thanks to federal regulators and the unjust California “justice” system.

Feb. 3, 2012

Putting its investment projections slightly more in line with reality, yesterday CalSTRS downgraded its fund forecast. According to its own announcement, “The governing board of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) today adopted a new set of actuarial assumptions, including lowering the investment return assumption from 7.75 percent to 7.5 percent. The change is part of a four-year experience analysis that sets the parameters for determining the financial health of the system.

“The assumptions update the actuarial experience analysis covering 2006 through 2010 and are used to evaluate the impact of both demographic and economic factors on the long-range financial health of CalSTRS. These assumptions, in turn, have a significant impact on the valuation of the plan, a snapshot of its financial health, scheduled to come before the Teachers’ Retirement Board in April.

“The most recent past valuation, presented in April 2011, showed a $56 billion funding shortfall, meaning that available assets fell $56 billion short of the system’s long-term obligations.”

That means California taxpayers are on the hook for making up that $56 billion.

But at least some reality has crept into the CalSTRS projections.

By contrast, sister fund CalPERS, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, has refused to change its assumptions. Reported Bloomberg, “Last March, the CalPERS board voted to maintain its 7.75 percent assumed rate, rejecting its actuaries’ recommendation to lower it to 7.5 percent.

“Of the 11 U.S. pension funds with assets of more than $50 billion, CalSTRS and systems in Wisconsin and New York reduced their assumptions since 2007-08, according to the staff report to the CalSTRS board.

“New York City owes its pensions more than previously anticipated because officials have been too optimistic in assuming an 8 percent return on the $115.2 billion that the five funds hold in assets, Chief Actuary Robert North has said.

“A more realistic expectation would be 7 percent, which would increase the city’s liability by about $2 billion if paid in one year, North said in a telephone interview.”

Actually, a Stanford study found that even CalSTRS’ 7.5 percent assumption is too optimistic — that 6 percent or lower is more realistic.

These state pension funds still don’t acknowledge that the 2007-09 Great Recession, and the tepid recovery since, scrambled all their calculations of fund gains. Taxpayers increasingly will be dinged to pay for the shortfalls.

Reform is more needed than ever.

Feb. 3, 2012

I’ve been arguing for a couple of years that the pension problem in California is so bad that the state will have to cut existing pensions. Is that supposedly banned by the California Constitution? It doesn’t matter. Constitutions can be changed. Actuarial realities cannot.

Such a cut could happen soon in Providence, R.I., a canary in the coal mine of pensions in America. Note that it’s Democrats making the cuts. Republicans there are even more scarce than in California.

Writes WPRI.com, a radio station there, “Rhode Island’s capital city will be in bankruptcy by June if it doesn’t get help resolving its financial crisis.

“That was the dire warning from Providence Mayor Angel Taveras during a Thursday morning news conference at City Hall. With five months left before the end of the fiscal year and the capital set to run out of cash by the start of summer, the city still faces a $22.5 million deficit in its budget for the current fiscal year, which ends June 30.

“The budget shortfall was projected at $110 million last March, when Taveras declared a ‘category five’ financial emergency in Providence. It was reduced after he negotiated new contracts with unions, laid off workers, cut spending and won increased state aid….

“Taveras said the city’s retirees must accept reduced pension and health care benefits to save the city from financial ruin. A decree signed in 1991 by Mayor Buddy Cianci pushed the city’s pension liability ‘into the stratosphere’ by giving annual cost-of-living increases of 5% and 6% to more than 600 retirees, he said.

“‘These retirees have refused to sacrifice and are costing Providence taxpayers tens of millions of dollars a year,’ Taveras said, calling the increases ‘raises,’ not adjustments to keep up with the cost of living. The mayor will hold a meeting with retirees on March 3 where they will be asked for concessions.

“Taveras’s office released a list showing that the city’s highest-paid pensioner, former Fire Chief Gilbert McLaughlin, now receives an annual pension of $196,813 a year. He retired with an annual salary of $63,510. At the current rate of growth, McLaughlin’s pension will total roughly $796,871 if he lives to the age of 100.”

All across America, government-worker unions remain unreasonable in resolving the pension and budget crises they caused through their greed. But there’s only so much money out there. The economy isn’t growing fast enough for the funds’ stock portfolios to recover from the crash of 2007-09.

This is just the beginning. Soon, California also will cut existing government retirees’ pensions.

(Hat tip to Jack Dean.)

Feb. 2, 2012

Does anyone still believe that these are just frustrated, misunderstood ’99 percenter’ college students who fear they won’t be able to find employment upon graduation? Or that the protests and demonstrations are being orchestrated by “a cadre of infiltrators hired by Wall Street or some shadowy right wing cabal to discredit the Occupy movement?”

Columnist Peter Schrag, retired edititorial page editor of The Sacramento Bee does. In an op ed Wednesday, he stated that his theory may be a stretch, but then said, “but the real events amount to nearly the same thing.

Many in the media have provided cover to the occupiers since the movement began, and even have attempted to explain-away Occupiers’ bad behavior by saying that they are just a bunch of dumb kids who don’t know what they are doing.  The movement only seemed to sustain because of the media coverage, and media support. And then it grew legs.

If you think they are not a serious movement, I have some swamp land to sell you. The media not only gave cover to the movement, they gave credence to Occupiers’ demands.

“The demonstrators’ anger is understandable, but the more intense it is, the more carefully it has to be directed,” Schrag wrote in Wednesday’s Bee.

Scrag neglects to mention in his column that Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, initially encouraged the occupiers, despite their muck, looting and arson. And Quan wasn’t alone. Prominent Democrats all over America stepped forward with support. Only in the new media were there reports of the Occupy movement being funded by labor unions, left wing financier George Soros, and even the Democratic National Committee.

However, after Saturday’s destruction derby inside Oakland City Hall, Quan appeared fed up with the pernicious protesting brats, and their leftist, nihilist friends. ”People in the community and people in the Occupy movement have to stop making excuses for this behavior,” Quan said.

Quan might have included the media in her statement.

The Left’s Stale Playbook

Standard operating procedure for the far left is to use violence when they are losing the intellectual battle – it’s in the playbook, and taught at most public universities. Where the media provided cover for the Occupiers was in how the story was told from the outset; Occupy Wall Street and the subsequent groups made no secret of the fact that they wanted to force businesses to close. They tried to interrupt commerce with the Port of Oakland closure, an event Mayor Jean Quan said she was powerless to stop.

Spreading filth in New York City’s Zuccotti Park, disrupting and disturbing commuters was all part of the plan. Read the Occupy Wall Street website - none of this is a secret.

Media Responsibility

Where this gets weird is when news organizations overstep their responsibility and stop reporting the news, and stories are peppered with opinion. Or only part of the story is told.

Schrag however, is a columnist, and expected to opine, however off base he is.

“Why close the port, one of the city’s few major sources of income and a source of jobs to hundreds of truckers, dockers and countless other blue-collar workers?” Schrag asks. “Why trash little downtown shops and eateries as some did last fall? These surely are not the 1 percent symbolized by Wall Street. Why shut down the airport, as some are now threatening to do? What message is being conveyed there? How is Oakland preferable to Piedmont or Newport Beach where the rich actually live?”

After reading Schrag’s encouragement to the occupy protestors to “go where the rich actually live,” I fully expect to see ‘Occupy Laguna Niguel,’ or ‘Occupy Pacific Heights’ groups created.

It’s All About ME

Many of the middle class whiners doing the protesting are college students upset that they will have to work for less than $100,000 a year when they graduate. They say they shouldn’t have to repay student loans or mortgages. Where does thinking like this come from?

They’ve been told all of their lives how great they are, and how everything they do is wonderful. But who would hire them with such narcissistic, self-absorbed senses of self-worth.

And now the kids are angry.

The students who are protesting should be turning on the teachers and ‘educators’ who passed them every year to the next grade when they couldn’t read and speak English, or do basic math… and the coaches and parent volunteers who handed out first place trophies and blue ribbons to overweight kids with two left feet… and the parents wouldn’t dish out some tough love and discipline, fearing their children wouldn’t like them… In the world of the Occupier, everyone is a winner, except those who work for a living.

The rest of the occupiers, save for a few ideologues in every crowd, are the sloths of American society who believe that instead of working hard to make themselves successful, they are entitled to the things they want, and that it is the responsibility of the government to take care of them and provide for them.

The Occupy movement is playing right into the political left’s class warfare campaign. It’s a tired, hackneyed play, right out of the pages of famous leftists’ writings.

“Occupy, lacking a defined agenda, has become more about itself than about the nation’s paralyzing economic inefficiency and injustice,” Schrag wrote, and the only thing he does get right.

Ultimately, leftists are about selfishness, not selflessness. They are about control, not inclusion. They are about secrecy, not transparency. Leftists are agitators, and have been identified in history as socialists, communists and radicals, not moderates or conservatives.

Conservative by definition, is stable, sober, traditional, orthodox and steady.

Leftists are theorists and perpetual students, not teachers. And as Dennis Miller so aptly said, “They’re squatters who don’t know squat.”

FEB. 2, 2012

feb. 2, 2012

What economic recovery?

Of the Top 10 worst cities for unemployment in the United States, eight were in California:

El Centro, Calif. 26.8 percent unemployed
Yuma, Ariz. 23.1
Merced, Calif. 18.7
Yuba City, Calif. 18.1
Visalia-Porterville, Calif. 16.2
Fresno, Calif. 16.2
Modesto, Calif. 16.1
Stockton, Calif. 15.9
Hanford-Corcoran, Calif. 15.3
Ocean City, N.J. 15.1

How depressing. Gov. Jerry Brown keeps yapping about raising our taxes and building a Moonbeam-worthy bullet train to nowhere. Meanwhile, back here on earth — specifically, Taxifornia — our people are suffering from among the highest tax rates, and definitely the most constricting regulations and worst government among the 50 states.

Here are the cities with the least unemployment:

Bismarck, N.D. 3.2 percent unemployed
Lincoln, Neb. 3.6
Fargo, N.D. 3.7
Burlington, Vt. 3.8
Logan, Utah 3.9
Midland, Texas 3.9
Houma-Bayou Cane-Thibodaux, La. 4.3
Sioux Falls, S.D. 4.3
Ames, Iowa 4.3
Iowa City, Iowa 4.3

All of those are in relatively low-tax states. Sure, North Dakota is enjoying a petroleum-based boom. But California could, as well, if our enviro-crazies would let us drill more, especially offshore.

But we’re too good for that. “Dirty” jobs in mining and manufacturing are evil, especially in the above cities with the worst employment rates. We only want nice, clean jobs like those in Silicon Valley. If you’re not a millionaire at Facebook, or Apple, or Google, then get lost. Or stay here and go on employment and welfare, and get an EBT card.

– Feb. 1, 2012

I’ve been reading Thomas Sowell for about 35 years now. He’s one of the few economists who can write in clear prose. Check out his columns and “The Thomas Sowell Reader.”

Or spend a month of evenings on his trilogy on global cultures. He spent several years traveling the world, analyzing what he saw. In modern America, especially on university campuses, “diversity” is used as a way to turn us against one another, with the government taking over greater portions of our lives.

But for Sowell, diversity represents the delightful variety of humanity, and is something to be enjoyed. The keys to tolerance are freedom and limited government.

Sowell has lived in California for a couple of decades and has an office at the Hoover Institution. I was delighted  to meet him about a decade ago when he stopped by our offices at the Orange County Register, when I was an editorial writer there with my colleague Steven Greenhut, to promote a book. Sowell is a true social and economic genius. He has a cheery affinity for California.

Jerry’s Choo-Choo

Sowell writes today about California’s absurd Jerry Brown and the governor’s obsession with the equally absurd California High-Speed Rail authority: “California has a huge state debt and Washington has a huge national debt. But that does not discourage either Governor Jerry Brown or President Barack Obama from wanting to launch a very costly high-speed rail system.

“Most of us might be a little skittish about spending money if we were teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. But the beauty of politics is that it is all other people’s money, including among those other people generations yet unborn.”

He writes about how Spain’s system is supposed to be a model for California’s bullet train. But he notes the the Iberian high-speed rail is subsidized by the Spanish government, which in turn is subsidized by the European Union.

He continues: “Someone once said that government is the illusion that we can all live off somebody else. Spain’s high-speed rail system is not even covering its operating costs, never mind the enormous costs of setting up the system in the first place. One reason is that half the seats are empty in the high-speed trains in Spain.

“That is what happens when you don’t have the population density required for passengers to cover the operating costs. You would need the hordes of Genghis Khan riding the high-speed rail system to cover the additional costs of the rails and the trains.

“An economics professor at the University of Barcelona says that Spain ‘has not recovered one single euro from the infrastructure investment’.”

Japan’s Train

Sowell points out that Japan’s bullet train between Tokyo and Osaka carries 130 million passengers a year. “But Tokyo alone has more than three times the population of San Francisco and Los Angeles put together.”

I would add that Japan’s population density is 873 people per square mile. But California’s is just 242 per square mile. That’s less than a third as much. So the ridership, and the productive population to support the infrastructure, is much smaller.

He notes that the first leg of the rail network supposedly will be laid between Fresno and Bakersfield, away from the state’s major population centers. “The only reason for even thinking about building a high-speed rail line between Fresno and Bakersfield is just to get the project underway with federal money, making it politically more difficult to stop the larger project for a similar rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

“In other words, they are going to start wasting money out in the valley, so that they will be able to waste more money later on, along the coast. This may not make any sense economically, but it can make sense politically for Jerry Brown and Barack Obama.

“An old song ended, ‘You’ve been running around in circles, getting nowhere – getting nowhere very fast.’ On high-speed rail.”

What a joke the whole thing is, beginning with Gov. Moonbeam.

But I dug out a YouTube of the song Sowell mentioned. It’s by the great Irving Berlin. Here’s a version by Der Bingle, Bing Crosby, another Californian:

Feb. 1, 2012

One good thing — if you can call it that — about Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposed $7 billion tax: It is revealing who is the “Establishment,” both Democrat and Republican, that really runs this state.

With the Republican Party basically moribund, Democrats are the only show in town. So the Establishment will funnel to them campaign cash, for candidates and favored initiatives.

That doesn’t mean the donors favor a particular donor or initiative, or Democrats in general. It means they’re buying influence with the powerful.

So it is with Brown’s tax. It’s unlikely to pass. Opponents will paint it as funding the cushy pensions of government retirees and the ridiculous High-Speed Rail boondoggle. Brown will insist, “No! It’s just going to schools! It’s guaranteed!” But few will believe him. All government money is fungible.

But the Establishment wants to be in good graces with Brown. Although the measure won’t pass, funneling money into it is a signal of membership in the Establishment. It’s ironic how Brown, who for decades has portrayed himself as a maverick, quirky “outsider,” has in his dotage become the ultimate Establishment “insider.”

Brown’s group is called, Californians to Protect Schools, Universities and Public Safety. It should be called, “Californians to Gouge Taxpayers to Fund Lavish Pensions.”

Here are some of the Establishment donors to the tax-gouging initiative, as reported by the Mercury-News:

* $500,000: California Association of Hospitals and Health Systems; now I know why a friend went to have his appendix carved out, and it cost $40,000 for a three-day stay: the hospitals are splurging on political influence peddling;
* $250,000: state building trades; now we know why housing, despite the recent decline, remains so unaffordable in Taxifornia; the money is splurged on stuff like this;
* $100,000: Blue Shield of California; my health insurance; thanks a lot for jacking up my insurance rates to pay for jacking up my taxes; that’s just sicko;
* $300,000: four Indian tribes; time to free the Indians and make them separate nations; then they’ll become tax havens like the Cayman Islands, instead of backing higher taxes;
* $250,000:  Occidental Petroleum Corporation; Lenin pal Armand Hammer’s old outfit.
* $250,000: the American Beverage Association; how about a booze tax, fellas? Or maybe we should bring back Prohibition? Where is Carrie Nation when we need her?

Feb. 1, 2012