A fantastic story in the NYT about how New Zealand farmers are better off without subsidies. P. J. O’Rourke said the best thing to do with farm subsides was to take them behind the barn and kill them with an ax. That looks more true with every passing day.
Neal Boortz has an interesting breakdown of where all the highway money in Minnesota has gone. People are blaming the Governnor for not raising taxes. In the meantime, the state spent $1.5 billion on bailing out the Teachers’ Retirement Fund and building a stadium for the Twins.
Cato on the liberal media again. I don’t mind a media that’s biased, but I do mind paying for said bias. But as we all know, only Fox News is biased. Everyone else is just “right”.
Continuing on the liberal media theme, the NYT has their article on the SCHIP bill. Notice that they don’t even question any assumptions, failing to point out that SCHIP will cover “poor” families making $82,600, 90% of whom already have insurance. They also fail to mention the crowd-out effect which means millions will lose their insurance and we’ll spend $15 billion insuring less than a million kids. Give me $15,000 and I’ll insure more than one child. They also fail to point out that we need 20 million new smokers to pay for this.
Oh, that liberal media! You know things are bad when the NYT’s reporting looks like a position paper from the Democratic party.
The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again! Children’s programming is being gutted by a lack of sponsors since junk food advertising has been banned (because we all know that parents can’t stop their kids from eating junk food). The solution will be to force them to pay for educational TV.
The house has OK’d drug reimportation. This could be a good thing if it forces the drug companies to refuse to do business with socialist price-fixing countries. We are paying almost all the R&D costs of the drug companies. Let’s see if they have the balls to fight. Of course, most libs have the “kill the goose” option – fix prices in this country.