Really bad financial news closer to home

Nearly a week after receiving the latest report on the financial mess that is the Kentucky Retirement Systems, the KRS has released their information to the unwashed masses.

The good news is that the unfunded actuarial liability has only increased by $1,684,998,416. The bad news is that even if we had an extra two billion dollars laying around, it would not put a dent in the deficit carried over from last year which was $31,128,411,829. And the really scary news is that the current $32,813,410,245 deficit is based on June 30, 2008 figures when the Dow Jones Industrial Average stood at 11,350. It is now 25% lower at 8452. The current figures also don't include all the toxic securities our investment gurus were loading up on before they exploded this past fall.

And, of course, you get to make up whatever they can't pay out. Good thing House Speaker Jody Richards fixed all this in June.

Don't hate the brown people

WHAS 11 reported on Mexican gangsters setting up shop in Kentucky which you may have already read about here.

"Sutter said, “Now is the time to get on this. It isn’t something we want to wait for. We need to be very proactive with this.""

"Shelbyville’s quality of life may depend on it."

"The latest report by the National Drug Intelligence Center reports drug cartel activity involving the Federation Cartel in Louisville and the rival Gulf Coast Cartel in Lexington."

"Authorities fear violence in the future as these two groups begin to fight over territory here in Kentucky."

You can watch the rest of the WHAS report here.

State investment experts play hide and seek

The Kentucky Retirement Systems seems to have something to hide.

New, New Deal is no free meal

America would be far better off if some of our elected "leaders" had to go to a car dealership and buy their own ride. Something magical happens when you go in, pick a car, and hear the salesman's first offer.

If you say no, the price goes down.

The same thing happens every place else in the economy. That's why there is no reason to be afraid of the possibility of price deflation. Think of it as a big blue light special. Enterprises needing exorbitant pricing just to stay afloat don't make it in times like this. Denying this fact only makes the reality more painful when it hits. Better to take our medicine and get on with it.

So President-elect Barack Obama's plan to "stimulate" the economy with $700 billion should be viewed as hostile to our interests. Will it allow some people to continue to be overpaid for a while? Yes. But I'd love to have someone explain to me how it benefits our nation as a whole to temporarily prop up the price level of anything when the market is trying to say that the party is over.

Like it or not, the market is going to win this one. Best to hang on to our money. We are going to need it.

Beshear misses out on another victim

On a weekend in which a vampire teen chick flick, Twilight, featured a young girl almost getting eaten, University of Louisville freshman Jordan Fulkerson should probably consider himself fortunate to be alive.

Jordan fell one sporting contest pick short of winning an ESPN online $1 million prize when the Atlanta Falcons beat the Carolina Panthers Sunday. Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear, who has already leapt fangs-first onto the back of online poker web sites, is on the rampage for tax money from innocent Kentuckians to prop up an unsustainable state government.

A belt for Jim Newberry to tighten

Lexington Mayor Jim Newberry is joining the tax increase chorus we are now hearing at all levels of government.

And yet, Lexington jail administrators are still zipping all over the state in taxpayer-provided cars.

Wonder why?

Rep. Ben Chandler, use your influence

Congressman Ben Chandler deserved some credit for voting against the bank bailout when his vote didn't matter.

Now he needs to step up when he can really make a difference.

North Carolina Congresswoman Virginia Foxx has filed a bill to cut our bailout losses in half.

Her bill needs Democratic co-sponsors, Rep. Chandler. Also don't see Rep. Hal Rogers, Rep. Geoff Davis, Rep. Ed Whitfield, Rep. Ron Lewis on there. Newly-elected Brett Guthrie could weigh in. And Rep. John Yarmuth should have to explain why he still wants to hand more money over to the fat cats.

Labor unions don't deserve more power

Union abuses have destroyed American auto manufacturers and mandated union wages on public construction projects cost Kentucky an extra $130 million a year.

So the last thing we should be doing is changing union elections to make them even more powerful.

But that is exactly what Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi want us to do:

Bipartisanship doesn't mean raising taxes

A press release from Frankfort Friday afternoon proclaims "Gov. Beshear says spending cuts necessary along with bipartisan approach to address state’s looming shortfall" (Emphasis added)

Gov. Steve Beshear was elected after saying that Kentuckians were taxed enough and didn't need higher taxes. He promised $180 million a year in "efficiences" that we still haven't seen.

And now he wants Republicans to buy in to tax increases.

Right. Let's eliminate prevailing wage and make top priority out of replacing the MUNIS system so we can begin to assess our K-12 spending nineteen years after KERA. Then we can get serious about public employee benefits reform and start to run Kentucky more like a legal entity set up to represent honest people rather than a slush fund to coddle cronies.

All the "hard work" and "pain" Beshear is talking about needs to start with a desire to really change the way things have been done way for too long.

Kentucky bureaucrats too big for their britches

Kentuckians should have no tolerance for government employees going around the law-making process to take rights away from citizens. That is what's happening in Hopkins County. When the local elected officials couldn't pass a smoking ban, they let the local health department enact one anyway.

"In a letter to the Hopkins County Health Department, Kentucky Freedom Coalition spokesman Hal Latham promised his group will “vigorously fight any attempt by the Health Board to enact laws concerning this matter . . . We are passionate about freedom and private property rights.""
"Surely, no process that exists is more fundamentally un-American than laws enacted and enforced by non-elected bureaucrats."

This is like feeding the bears. If we let them ravage private business owners who choose to allow smoking, who will speak up when they come for the rest of us?

Throwing good money after bad

Let's kill the whole auto bailout.

The guys in the private jets from Ford, Chrysler, and GM say if we give them "only" $25 billion, they could go out of business. Well, if giving them $50 billion is too much (and it is) and giving them $25 billion is not enough though it is the only viable political option, then it doesn't really matter if we call the $25 billion a loan, does it?

I prefer the term "government waste."

Promising to spend money they didn't have and couldn't earn got them into this mess. Doesn't make much sense to "loan" them anything we can't afford to burn, does it?

Bankruptcy organization looks like their best option.

And as far as "saving the jobs" goes: how long should we prop up jobs that the marketplace says we don't need. Is someone going to do that for you if your job becomes obsolete?

Hillary with a hairpiece

Looks like former Senator Tom Daschle is going to be the Health and Human Services Cabinet Secretary in the Obama administration.

Hold on tight to your health insurance card with this one.

Wouldn't it be great if, instead of expanding government's role in healthcare, we could shrink it? Federal and state management of the medical system has done limited damage only in the sense that it's role hasn't been allowed to expand quite as far as in other places. Daschle is coming in to "change" that.

States like Kentucky could actually teach the feds a thing or two about pulling back successfully from the brink of government-run health insurance disaster. But no one in charge is listening to that kind of talk now.

Before we go to a Medicare for All approach, someone might want to point out to the good time gang that Medicare's hospital insurance fund is set to be insolvent by 2019, during President Joe Biden's first term.

Killing the next bailout in its infancy

While everyone else is talking about the proposed auto industry bailout, some are already kicking around a request for a newspaper industry rescue plan.

One former newspaper editor says on his blog that it won't happen:

"Beyond pure economic considerations, of course, there is the emotionally persuasive argument that the press needs to be saved so it can fulfill its unique role as the watchdog for the oldest democracy in the world. The problem is that it is difficult to imagine how the vigor and independence of the press would be maintained if the industry depended on the largesse of the very government officials it is supposed to be watching."

What's funny is that, in Kentucky, many newspapers already are very dependent on that largesse.

We are looking for ways to cut government spending, aren't we? The time has come to declare newspapers a non-essential government expenditure.

Hide your arrogance, bloggers are everywhere

From the Hey-are-you-guys-still-in-business? Department:

Louisville Courier Journal Editorial Page Editor Keith Runyon defended the paper for calling rural Kentuckians yokels:

"We never used the term "yokels," but rather "Yokeldom" as a reference to the general population of backward people."

The slur appeared in a November 11 unsigned editorial. I can only assume that Mr. Runyon thinks that if his "apology" isn't good enough for you it is because you are too stupid to understand it.

Jody Richards' disenfranchisement scheme

Clinging bitterly to his job as Speaker of the House, Jody Richards thinks he is going to avoid accountability for his failures in office by silencing the voices of a precinct full of voters in this latest election.

At issue is a vote scanner that failed mid-day on November 4 at the Pine Valley precinct in Elizabethtown. Precinct workers, in order to continue allowing voters to vote, removed the paper ballots from what was a non-functioning machine. A bipartisan team of precinct workers handled the transition to a new machine. The Democratic County Clerk Kenneth L. Tabb said the proper procedure was followed.

The votes in the whole district have been counted twice. Rep. Tim Moore, a Republican, won both times. Former Rep. Mike Weaver, however, could find himself magically back in Frankfort to try to save Jody Richards only if all the votes in that one precinct are thrown out.

So guess what they are trying to do?

The Secretary of State's office will certify the election Friday afternoon and then Speaker Jody Richards is expected to challenge the results.

Guess where House election challenges are heard?

In the House. With Speaker Jody Richards presiding.

Now this would work

Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform suggests the $700 billion federal bailout go like this: $170 billion to cut the corporate tax rate from 35% to 15%, $35 billion to eliminate capital gains and dividend taxes, $235 billion to cut the top individual tax rate to 15%, $24 billion to kill the Death Tax, and $240 billion to allow companies to fully-expense capital assets purchased the first year.

Sounds better than the rat hole approach currently underway.

The auto bailout in one sentence

If we "protected" horse buggy manufacturers when those newfangled cars came along, we would all still have manure on our shoes.

Gov. Mark Sanford, the Anti-Racist

At their Republican Governor's Association meeting, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist was talking about "reaching out" to black and Hispanic voters:

""The most important thing is to make sure that we reach out to Hispanic voters, to African-American voters,” Crist said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt.""

Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina had a much better answer:

""The problem to a degree we’ve had as Republicans has been running on one message of conservatism and then governing a very different way," Sanford said. "I think that the way that you appeal to blacks or Hispanics is to first of all carefully define what you’re about.""

That's exactly right, Gov. Sanford. And some Republicans on Capitol Hill need to start by going back and reading what their own party platform has to say about government bailouts.

Hint: they were against them before they were for them. Time to go back to Plan A.

Time to talk about "global warming"

Worse than "spread the wealth"

In a sane world, candidate Barack Obama's spread the wealth comment would have sent him to George McGovern and Michael Dukakis land.

Of course, mental health is not currently political America's strong suit.

So the official President-elect of the mainstream media, which, by the way, is next up as the industry too big to fail, can get away with saying this:

"President-elect Barack Obama said the U.S. government will do "whatever it takes" to revive the economy, and that means "we shouldn't worry about the deficit next year or even the year after.""

That's a different tune than he was singing right before the election.

Imagine that -- another politician claiming he is going to fix everything with an efficiency study.