Greg Abbott, Candidate for Governor, Republic of Texas

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          The overwhelmingly popular Greg Abbott, Attorney General of the Republic of Texas and candidate for the Republican nomination for the position of Governor of the Republic of Texas, offended a few chip-on-the-shoulder specialists and even the increasingly leftist McAllen Monitor by observing that corruption in the Lower Rio Grande Valley had reached the point again of appearing similar to a third world country.

     Various of the professional victim class immediately howled to the moon about the obvious "racism" being slung at the victim group by a mean old white man.   Little matter of course that the whiners were whites of Latin origin, and little matter of course that the McAllen Monitor had just run a front page, Sunday edition article detailing the horrid record that has been compiled by various district attorneys, district judges, county commissioners, high ranking police, sheriff's department, jailers, elected Sheriffs, County Judges (In Texas, the chief executive officer of the county), high ranking city officials of the various cities, etc. etc. in the four county Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, (Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr, and Willacy), located at the very southernmost tip of the Republic of Texas.

 

      The record is horrid.   It has been weak, save for rare occasion, during the entirety of the 20th Century, for much of the 19th Century that included the existence of these counties, and for all of the 21st Century to this point.

 

     During the early 1900s John Closner was Sheriff and later County Judge of Hidalgo County.   He was a total back-shooting, corrupt cad.  The main drag through Edinburg to his day carries his name, as some kind of honour although he deserved none.

      The OROGs might remember a blond girl on the Hee-Haw Show, with Buck Owens and Roy Clark.   She was the girl who, at the very end of the show, would sprightly declare, "That's all!"   Well,  I knew Kathy Baker, she was a friend of mine, and you Wendy Davis, are no Kathy Baker.

     But, although Kathy Baker help learn me up how to ride a bicycle over by their place in Edinburg....next to the college campus...she was the granddaughter of A.Y. Baker. easily the most corrupt County Judge in the history of Hidalgo County....and certainly among the top ten in the history of Texas.   Archer Parr and his nephew George Parr who controlled most of the centre area of South Texas from their perch in Duvall County ranked right up there with the worst of them.   We could go on forever about corruption in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, and especially when the Anglo cohort was in the far majority, before the 1970s.
     The immediate response by Democrats who will always, always, always use the race and ethnic card first, and usually only (it's the only card they have due to their abjectly defective intellectual and reasoning abilities) available response fall-back line.   This time the Democrat operatives, including Gilbert Hinojosa, the Executive Director of the Democrat Party of Texas walked into the buzzsaw  and, like the McAllen Monitor, re-made themselves the fools they were before this matter struck up, and as they will remain after this matter is long, long forgotten.

     You see, Greg Abbott's family and friend orbit is substantially Latinate, and he has an English surname, and he is disabled, and I think he has green eyes.  He probably has ancestors who fought for the Confederacy as well.   So I guess that makes him a Texan with Hot Wheels.

Please read General Abbott's own defence (and wonderful offense) below:

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And that was the name of that tune!

El Gringo Viejo

Oldie Goldie by Request....

 

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Monday, 13 May 2013

Yes. Virginia, the Internal Revenue Service is the Foundation for a National Socialist Oligarchy

    Virginia, y0u will be a big girl soon.   There are things you need to understand.   Not just know, but truly understand for your own good, and for the good of the family you will have to raise.

 

     The first thing is to know what a marxist is and what a national socialist is.   They are very similar and frequently move around in each other's company.   Members of those secular faiths uniformly can be known by the following:

 

     (1)    Each member assumes himself to be superior intellectually to all and any other human, especially of the common class, aka - "proles". 

 

    (2)    Each member assumes that he will rise to the top of the political organisation and thereby make his way to comfortable employment and privilege of acquisition of nice things that should not be wasted on common people, aka "proles".

 

    (3)    Each member of socialist-styled parties of any kind knows that he is entitled to prescribe what the common people will think and do, where they will live, what they will eat, what they will study, how many children, if any, they will be allowed, and they will be allowed access medical services, and of course what they will earn and be allowed to keep.   None will be allowed to have firearms, of course.  Firearms are very dangerous.

 

     (4)   Each member is part of an elite who is not bound by the rules or the laws that must necessarily pertain to the common class.  He will have a blue identification card, while the common "proles" will have plain white cards, that if lost, they will have to replace and also provide 1,000 hours of community service to make up for their carelessness.

 

     (5)   All commoners will be required to report their earnings to Central Finance, on an annual basis.  If sufficient money has not been paid, according to the judgement of the governing group, the balance must be rendered within 5 days or the tribute payer will be incarcerated for a lengthy, undetermined period of time.

 

     (6)    All "proles" will be paid in a range whereby no one person within the prefect or soviet will be permitted to make 10 percent more or less than any other "prole".   Such income restrictions will not pertain to members of the permanent ruling government party,  known as"Masters".

 

     (7)     All "proles" will be  required to say the following pledge each day, into the sound and hearing facilitation devices that are fitted into every room of  every house and living facility in the Fatherland:

 

      I pledge all fealty to the Fatherland.  All that I own comes from the managers of the Fatherland.   All that I am allowed to eat, do, see, speak of, live in, think, and associate with is granted by the central Government, and I am indebted to the Government forever.  I promise to do what I am told to do.

 

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

 

     Now, Virginia we have arrived in the United States of America to the point where such configurations of society always wind up.   Debt, social disorganisation, dependency upon the government....these are all good things.   The greater part of entire races within the  population hopelessly dependent, old people frightened by the breakdowns of government programs    without which they think they cannot live, young people who are hopelessly ignorant and socially incompetent, hedonistic, spoiled, and feeling entitled.   All of these problems come from they perceive to be underfunded central government programs.   This is always good, because such things can be blamed upon the rich because they "have" while the others "have naught".    And we can continue to generate hatred for the people who cost the government nothing and give their money to the people who want everything without paying for it.

 

      As socialist elitists, we can "speak for the Poor", although we certainly would never live or break bread with them.  They are dirty and smell funny.   But we take a goodly share of the money that we require from the rich and wealthy,  and then allow the "proles" to have some of that same taking, while we lounge on the beaches of the Dominican Republic and dream up campaign slogans about the rich parking their money "offshore".   We frequently learn about how to accuse the rich and the wealthy of doing such things because it is what we do.   The trick is to have a compliant press who will disregard the rich peoples' complaints against us, and to take seriously the charges we make against the rich people.   And remember, when you become a socialist, a rich person is not determined to be such by his amount of money or possessions.  A rich or wealthy person is any person who can feed, house, clothe, and move around without any government money or assistance.   People who are not dependent upon the government cannot be trusted or easily controlled.

 

     Now, as you graduate to the next level of being an elite, remember to always damage the small and medium sized businesses, and make friends with the huge businesses.  The bigger businesses will do anything for government contracts.   Always make alliances with Labour Unions who "know the score" and "how to play the game".  Labour unions are organised to produce money for socialist politicians and to deliver votes from dull, stupid people who think they will receive money for not working, while they smoke dope on their breaks, and go back to pilfer and sabotage company equipment.    It is called "On the Road to the Workers' Paradise".

     Now, Virginia...go, destroy the Great God Yahweh, install the god Ba'al,  major in Analytical Toothbrush Tarnish in Zimbabwe, and demand FREE oral contraceptives.....go to the Ivy Leagues and then go to work for the Central Soviet.

 

 

I am Adolf Schwartzengruber, and I approve of this message.
And...a hearty hello to my great friend and inspiration, Margaret Sanger!!
Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP);   







I am Nicolai Ilyich Lenin, and I approve of this message.   I would like to give a shout out to my good friends, Eleanor Roosevelt and Armand Hammer.
Коммунистическая партия Советского Союза

 

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Now, when we had faith, this is how the newspaper responded in those times, in the New York Sun on the 21st day of September, 1897... just after the Editor had seen this brief letter;

 

 

"DEAR EDITOR: I am 8 years old.
"Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
"Papa says, 'If you see it in THE SUN it's so.'
"Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

"VIRGINIA O'HANLON.
"115 WEST NINETY-FIFTH STREET."
(this
 address
 is between
Broadway and
 Central Park, in
 downtown -  most
Manhattan, New York
  City, New York, about six
  blocks from where David Christian's
 uncle lived, and where David and his
 family stayed briefly before moving on
 to Albany, in the Up-state.  The year is 1807.
David and his wife Esther Webster, were Anglos
 who had originated in County Wicklow, married at Christ's
 Church Cathedral (Anglican), in Dublin,  They came to America to
 join other English  Christians, (relatives) in New York.  David Christian's
 (this writer) great-great-great-grandfather John was born between the British
 Isles and Hudson Harbour.   El Gringo Viejo,  when asked, "Are youa good Christian?",
 he always responds,
 "Why madam,
 I am
 such a
  good
Christian
 my middle
 name is
  Christian!")

 

 

 

 This I believe,

 El Gringo Viejo

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How can anyone plan anything? And a message from El Zorro!!!

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   The Obama Socialised Medicine Initiative (OSMI) must most certainly be the greatest quagmire morass of a quicksand swamp, full of Whatifee Monsters in the History of the Universe.   It had to have been done on purpose.   No organisation or individual could have done this much clumdumery accidentally.

 

     The notion that a president can demand the passage of a piece of legislation, and then fail to impose what was purported to be absolutely, urgently necessary measures authorised by the legislation stifles the thought processes of the reasonable person.

 

     The notion that the objective of a piece of legislation that was supposed to give 30,000,000 people, finally, the security of medical insurance has been dismissed by the fact that even more people now have no insurance than before the passage of the bill.

 

     The favouritism that was practiced from the beginning of this horrid regime,  well-typified by the arbitrary divestment of the General Motors and Chrysler private bond and preferred stock holders, has been startling.  It reveals the  dark nature that dwells within the heart and mind of each marxist and/or practitioner of national socialism.  This administration has swayed to and fro from the one political philosophy to the other during the entire nightmare of its term.

 

     To-day, we  are marxists,  moving to socialise and bring the activity under direct government control and ownership, as in the nationalisation of the student loan programme.  To-morrow we are national socialists, moving to coerce  private individuals and private insurance companies by legislation and implied force of arms and incarceration to devise insurance packages that meet required, governmentally approved guidelines and inclusions.

 

      Every encounter with the legislative precincts is seen as an opportunity for confrontation.   Capture your opponent, says Saul  Linsky in his book, Rules for Radicals.  Frame the enemy in the headlights and ridicule him, accusing him of all outlandish motives and deeds.   Especially accuse your enemy of thinking about or trying to do nefarious things that you yourself are already doing.   And always attack.  Never deny.   As you are registering people to vote without regard to legal prescription, accuse your enemies of trying to suppress the vote of "minorities and the poor".

     And, just to put a cherry on top of the sundae, change elements of the Law of Nationalisation of the Medical Sector, known here as the OSMI by pronunciamento and a wave of the sceptre.   Stroke of a pen, Law of the land. The date of implementation is changed again.

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Then, after being spent, exhausted by my own ire and worry there is a new admonition from the vigilant knight who sees the advance of arbitrary totalitarianism and who rides to warn that he can see them approaching from the other side of the mountain.

 

oooo0000OOOOO0000oooo

Phillip Seymour Hoffman
greatness that flashed, lured away
by the dreaded addiction, and in spite
of what we might wish, soon forgotten.
A terrible waste...pray that it not be an
analogy for our Republic

     In El Gringo Viejo’s journal of February 12, 2013 he cited and contributed to an analysis of the job market and economy by an economist named Casey Mulligan.  The meat of his thesis is that paying poor people begets more poor people.  Supply and demand, don’t you know.  The same as a drug addict or, in the parlance of the addiction “community”,  "The more drugs there are available, the more addicts we shall have."  From that basic reality, we know that the addicts are not able to quit and that they always demand more to feed the habit.

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     In our present economy, we have a Keynesian system that supports the addiction idea.  There are already enough deadbeats and degenerates that feed off the freebees but it is growing so that the population at large is becoming addicted as well.  As we lose people from the labor force to welfare, productivity should, theoretically, go down; however, one thing Mr. Mulligan did not address that is in opposition to this theory (that the shrinking of the labor force will decrease profitability of businesses and the GNP) is that labor is going overseas and out of the US.

   In addition to technology picking up some of the slack, the lower cost of labor outside the US actually causes increased profitability.  That would be a good thing except for the fact we are becoming less of a strong incentivized people.  Instead, we see ourselves fundamentally changing into a nation of couch potatoes, becoming hooked on everything "for free".

   That brings us to the immigration issue.  The demand for labor also attracts illegal (and legal) immigrants who want the jobs that those dropping out of the work force are abandoning.  This is exactly what our President had in mind when he said “We are five days away from fundamentally changing America”. 

   Who knew?  Some of us did, but perhaps we have not shouted loudly enough.

 

   Obama is displacing the middle class with a lower class… third world job and public assistance seekers and in so doing is fundamentally making America truly “the land of the free (stuff)”.

 

     The “pusher” is not going to stop until and unless the addicts get help.  Selling drugs without a prescription is illegal.  Mr. President, you have to quit selling unconstitutional opium to the people.  You are killing the soul of America and the hearts of the people no less than a pusher kills a junkie by luring and addicting unsuspecting (low information) Americans.

 

   Americans, it will take all we have to get straight.  There is no patch or electronic cigarette to fix this addiction.  It takes willpower and a higher power to guide us.  We have to do this.  Get off the free stuff and work for it.  Tell our children, our grandchildren...tell them face to face. If anyone can do it, everyone can do it.  I am talking to you who are addicted or who have kith and/or kin who are addicted.  Get off the stuff!

  Go get a job and see how good it feels to come home having done something productive.  Just go to work and don’t look back.  Then let’s go vote.  Make sure the pusher pays!

 

 The Pusher in the White House says, "Vote. Voting is the best revenge."

 He was right.  Let us take our revenge in the defence of the Republic.

 El Zorro

  



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Long and Complex, but worth it. Another peek under the circus tent from Extreme Central Texas

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We are going to suggest that the OROG read this article, found at this linkage.  This is an examination of the recent fall in the price of gold.  It represents a school of thought that has yet to be effectively refuted.  The analysis is expert.   The author of the article has written a book which references the idea that there is a failure of the Laissez Faire Capitalist system.  He points out that that system allowed the rise of banks that are too big to fail.

 

     The very slight reservation that El Gringo Viejo has with his premise is that if the central government  and the Federal Reserve somehow control the events that allowed some banks to become too big to fail, then the system was not a true Laissez Faire Capitalist or Free Enterprise system.  It was a national socialist system.   However, Dr. Craig Roberts is a cat lover and a brilliant analyst with whom this blog finds about a 96% concurrence and/or agreement.

 

     The article is about a 6 to 8 minute read.   There are some interesting graphics that will really make the reader scratch his chin stubble and nod.

 

 

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/01/17/hows-whys-gold-price-manipulation/

 

 

Do read this.  It is not like medicine that tastes bad or a trip to the dentist in the least.

El Gringo Viejo

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More News from "Extreme Central Texas" (our spies see everyting)

Update: The map above and the table below have been slightly revised so that both the GDP of US states and the GDP of foreign countries are in descending order in the table below.

The map above is an updated version of a similar map from 2007 here.

The map was created by matching economic output in US states in 2012 to foreign countries with comparable GDPs, using BEA data for GDP by state here and GDP by country from the United Nations, via Wikipedia here. For each US state (and the District of Columbia), I tried to find the country closest in economic size in 2012 (measured by GDP), and for each state there was a country with a pretty close match – those countries are displayed in the map above and in the table below. Obviously, in some cases the closest match was a country that produced slightly more, or slightly less economic output in 2012 than a given US state.

It’s pretty amazing how ridiculously large the US economy is, and the map above helps put America’s GDP of $16.2 trillion in 2012 (and more than $17 trillion in Q4 2013) into perspective by comparing the GDP of US states to other country’s entire national GDP. For example:

1. America’s largest state economy is California, which produced $2.003 trillion of economic output in 2012, just slightly below Italy’s GDP in the same year of $2.013 trillion. In 2012, California would have been tied with Italy as the 9th largest economy in the world. And California’s population is only 38 million compared to Italy’s population of 61 million, which means California produces the same economic output as Italy with 37% fewer people. That’s a testament to the superior, world-class productivity of the American worker.

2. America’s second largest state economy – Texas – produced $1.4 trillion of economic output in 2012, placing it just slightly behind the world’s 13th largest country by GDP – Australia – with $1.56 trillion of economic output.

3. Even with all of its oil wealth, Saudi Arabia’s GDP in 2012 at $711 billion was less than GDP in Florida ($777 billion) and just slightly more than the GDP in Illinois ($695 billion).

4. New York’s GDP in 2012 of $1.205 trillion was slightly more than Mexico’s GDP of $1.18 trillion, even though Mexico’s population of 120.8 million people is 6.2 times larger than the number of people living in New York (19.6 million). Another example of the world-class productivity of the American workforce.

5. Washington state produces almost as much economic output ($375.7 billion) as Venezuela ($382 billion), even though Venezuela’s population (30 million) is more than four times larger than Washington’s (6.9 million).

6. Likewise, capitalist West Virginia produces about the same GDP as communist Cuba, even though Cuba’s population is more than six times larger than West Virginia’s.

 

MP: Overall, the US produced 22.3% of world GDP in 2012, with only 4.4% of the world’s population. Three of America’s states (California, Texas and New York) – as separate countries – would rank in the world’s top 15 largest economies. And one of those states – California – produced more than $2 trillion in economic output in 2012 – and the other two (Texas and New York) produced more than $1 trillion of GDP in 2012. The map and these statistics help remind us of the enormity of the economic powerhouse we live in. So let’s not lose sight of how ridiculously large and powerful the US economy is, and how much wealth and prosperity is being created all the time in the world’s largest economic engine.

 

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     These figures are very interesting and largely accurate.  There is data that indicates that both Texas and Mexico have crossed the two trillion dollar GNP level about 18 months ago.  There are other analysts and bean counter people who disagree.  Brazil and Argentina consistently have been over-rated in terms of GNP, and all of this may be because of a bias to the left by analysts.   Many leftist economists, for instance, hate Mexico because Mexico, as the leftist say, keeps "going Freedman".

     We are fascinated by these charts and interpretations.  We keep trying to point out how, in per capita terms, Red China is a demographic basket case.  Texas, Mexico, and Canada with fewer than 200 million people has a combined GNP equivalent to Red China with 1.3 billion people.

 

 We like demographic and geographical information, especially as it relates to Texas, the United States, Mexico, and North America in general.   Maps are also fun.

El Gringo Viejo

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Although we are miffed at the WSJ....they are family, and here are their good works.

¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬

     As the Obamatrons sally forth to explain that unemployment compensation payments are the one sure way to end a depression, and shovel ready projects are the one sure way to end the recession left to me by the Bush people, and that the only way to solve the employment and economic softness problem is to invest in Solyndra and Fisker.   Of course,  the only way to implement free health care for everyone is to charge everyone three to ten times more than they were paying before, and tolerate the fact that there will still be 30,000,000 of the poor unfortunates that we were told we were going to finally get involved the health care (they all already were, through Medicaid).

    This article was forwarded by our informants who live in "extreme Central Texas" near Later, Texas.  It is called Later because when the railway was built through, the administrators told the workers, "We'll come back and name this town Later".
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THE NOT-SO-AFFORDABLE CARE ACT

All credit for this article is attributed to:

By Joseph Rago

Joseph.Rago@wsj.com

Biography and connect

          Feb. 7, 2014 6:30 p.m. ET

In September, two weeks before the Affordable Care Act was due to launch, President Obama declared that "there's no serious evidence that the law . . . is holding back economic growth." As for repealing ObamaCare, he added, "That's not an agenda for economic growth. You're not going to meet an economist who says that that's a number-one priority in terms of boosting growth and jobs in this country—at least not a serious economist."

                                              

Casey Mulligan Ken Fallin

     In a way, Mr. Obama had a point: "Never met him," says economist Casey Mulligan. If the unfamiliarity is mutual, the confusion is all presidential. Mr. Mulligan studies how government choices influence the incentives and rewards for work—and many more people may recognize the University of Chicago professor as a serious economist after this week. That's because, more than anyone, Mr. Mulligan is responsible for the still-raging furor over the Congressional Budget Office's conclusion that ObamaCare will, in fact, harm growth and jobs.

Enlarge Image

Rarely are political tempers so raw over an 11-page appendix to a dense budget projection for the next decade. But then the CBO—Congress's official fiscal scorekeeper, widely revered by Democrats and Republicans alike as the gold standard of economic analysis—reported that by 2024 the equivalent of 2.5 million Americans who were otherwise willing and able to work before ObamaCare will work less or not at all as a result of ObamaCare.

As the CBO admits, that's a "substantially larger" and "considerably higher" subtraction to the labor force than the mere 800,000 the budget office estimated in 2010. The overall level of labor will fall by 1.5% to 2% over the decade, the CBO figures.

Mr. Mulligan's empirical research puts the best estimate of the contraction at 3%. The CBO still has some of the economics wrong, he said in a phone interview Thursday, "but, boy, it's a lot better to be off by a factor of two than a factor of six."

The CBO's intellectual conversion is all the more notable for accepting Mr. Mulligan's premise, which is that what economists call "implicit marginal tax rates" in ObamaCare make work less financially valuable for lower-income Americans. Because the insurance subsidies are tied to income and phase out as cash wages rise, some people will have the incentive to remain poorer in order to continue capturing higher benefits. Another way of putting it is that taking away benefits has the same effect as a direct tax, so lower-income workers are discouraged from climbing the income ladder by working harder, logging extra hours, taking a promotion or investing in their future earnings through job training or education.

The CBO works in mysterious ways, but its commentary and a footnote suggest that two National Bureau of Economic Research papers Mr. Mulligan published last August were "roughly" the most important drivers of this revision to its model. In short, the CBO has pulled this economist's arguments and analysis from the fringes to center of the health-care debate.

For his part, Mr. Mulligan declines to take too much credit. "I'm not an expert in that town, Washington," he says, "but I showed them my work and I know they listened, carefully."

At a February 2013 hearing he pointed out several discrepancies between the CBO's marginal-tax-rate work and its health-care work, and, he says, "That couldn't persist forever. There would have to be a time where they would reconcile those two approaches somehow." More to the point, "I knew eventually it would be acknowledged that when you pay people for being low income you are going to have more low-income people."

Mr. Mulligan thinks the CBO deserves particular credit for learning and then revising the old 800,000 number, not least because so many liberals cited it to dispute the claims of ObamaCare's critics. The new finding might have prompted a debate about the marginal tax rates confronting the poor, but—well, it didn't.

Instead, liberals have turned to claiming that ObamaCare's missing workers will be a gift to society. Since employers aren't cutting jobs per se through layoffs or hourly take-backs, people are merely choosing rationally to supply less labor. Thanks to ObamaCare, we're told, Americans can finally quit the salt mines and blacking factories and retire early, or spend more time with the children, or become artists.

Mr. Mulligan reserves particular scorn for the economists making this "eliminated from the drudgery of labor market" argument, which he views as a form of trahison des clercs. "I don't know what their intentions are," he says, choosing his words carefully, "but it looks like they're trying to leverage the lack of economic education in their audience by making these sorts of points."

A job, Mr. Mulligan explains, "is a transaction between buyers and sellers. When a transaction doesn't happen, it doesn't happen. We know that it doesn't matter on which side of the market you put the disincentives, the results are the same. . . . In this case you're putting an implicit tax on work for households, and employers aren't willing to compensate the households enough so they'll still work." Jobs can be destroyed by sellers (workers) as much as buyers (businesses).

He adds: "I can understand something like cigarettes and people believe that there's too much smoking, so we put a tax on cigarettes, so people smoke less, and we say that's a good thing. OK. But are we saying we were working too much before? Is that the new argument? I mean make up your mind. We've been complaining for six years now that there's not enough work being done. . . . Even before the recession there was too little work in the economy. Now all of a sudden we wake up and say we're glad that people are working less? We're pursuing our dreams?"

The larger betrayal, Mr. Mulligan argues, is that the same economists now praising the great shrinking workforce used to claim that ObamaCare would expand the labor market.

He points to a 2011 letter organized by Harvard's David Cutler and the University of Chicago's Harold Pollack, signed by dozens of left-leaning economists including Nobel laureates, stating "our strong conclusion" that ObamaCare will strengthen the economy and create 250,000 to 400,000 jobs annually. (Mr. Cutler has since qualified and walked back some of his claims.)

"Why didn't they say, no, we didn't mean the labor market's going to get bigger. We mean it's going to get smaller in a good way," Mr. Mulligan wonders. "I'm unhappy with that, to be honest, as an American, as an economist. Those kind of conclusions are tarnishing the field of economics, which is a great, maybe the greatest, field. They're sure not making it look good by doing stuff like that."

Mr. Mulligan's investigation into the Affordable Care Act builds on his earlier work studying the 2009 Recovery and Reinvestment Act, aka the stimulus.

The Keynesian economists who dominate Mr. Obama's Washington are preoccupied by demand, and their explanation for persistently high post-recession unemployment is weak demand for goods and thus demand for labor. Mr. Mulligan, by contrast, studies the supply of labor and attributes the state of the economy in large part to the expansion of the entitlement and welfare state, such as the surge in food stamps, unemployment benefits, Medicaid and other safety-net programs. As these benefits were enriched and extended to more people by the stimulus, he argues in his 2012 book "The Redistribution Recession," they were responsible for about half the drop in work hours since 2007, and possibly more.

The nearby chart tracks marginal tax rates over time for nonelderly household heads and spouses with median earnings. This index is a population-weighted average over various ages, jobs, employment decisions like full-time versus part-time. Basically, the chart shows the extra taxes paid and government benefits foregone as a result of earning an extra dollar of income.

The stimulus caused a spike in marginal rates, but at least it was temporary. ObamaCare will bring them permanently into the 47% range, or seven percentage points higher than in early 2007. Mr. Mulligan says the main response to his calculations is that people "didn't realize the cumulative effect of these things together as a package to discourage work."

Mr. Mulligan is uncomfortable speculating about whether the benefits of this shift outweigh the costs. Perhaps the public was willing to trade market efficiency for more income security after the 2008 crisis. "As an economist I can't argue with that," he says. "The thing that I argue with is the denial that there is a trade-off. I argue with the denial that if you pay unemployed people you're going to get more unemployed people. There are consequences of that. That doesn't mean the consequences aren't worth paying. But you can't deny the consequences for the labor market."

One major risk is slower economic growth over time as people leave the workforce and contribute less to national prosperity. Another is that social programs with high marginal rates end up perpetuating the problems they're supposed to be alleviating.

So amid the current wave of liberal ObamaCare denial about these realities, how did Mr. Mulligan end up conducting such "unconventional" research?

"Unconventional?" he asks with more than a little disbelief. "It's not unconventional at all. The critique I get is that it's not complicated enough."

Well, then how come the CBO's adoption of his insights is causing such a ruckus?

"I would phrase the question a little differently," Mr. Mulligan responds, "which is: Why didn't conventional economic analysis make its way to Washington? Why was I the only delivery boy? Why wasn't there a laundry list?" The charitable explanation, he says, is that there was "a general lack of awareness" and economists simply didn't realize everything that government was doing to undermine incentives for work. "You have to dig into it and see it," he explains. "The Affordable Care Act's not going to come and shake you out of your bed and say, 'Look what's in me.' "

Judging by their reaction to the CBO report, the less charitable explanation is that liberals would have preferred that the public never found out.

 

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      It is open and shut.  The purpose for the establishment of the Obama Socialised Medical Initiative (OSMI) was, is, and forever shall be the absolute abolition of the lowest range of the wealthy class, or people with between 100,000 and 10,000,000 USD of net worth.  The mega-wealthy do not want to share their yacht slips with the hoi polloi who are only running 59 feet or less.  They certainly do not want to be in the same hospital with people who work with their hands, or who have not graduated from the A-list of private, Ivy League, AlGore-approved universities.

 

      If there is any deviation from the objective to totally rescind and repeal the Obama Socialised Medicine Initiative, the American Republic will be lost.   It is the most hideous form of Trojan Horse that can possibly exist.

 

Thank you all for your kind attention.  More later.

El Gringo Viejo

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