Sign the Petition on #Gun Control Now – Kindly share with Friends or Re-Blog

On December 14, 2012, a gunman entered the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut and opened fire, killing 26 people, 20 of whom were children. Completely innocent unarmed victims.

Columbine. Red Lake Minnesota. Essex Vermont. Lancaster. Aurora. Virginia Tech. To name a few. How many more innocents must die at the hands of an antiquated and oft-misinterpreted amendment? Enough.

It’s time to stop the violence.

Gun Control doesn’t have to mean no guns. I’m not suggesting we take guns away. I’m suggesting we put tighter controls on acquiring and owning them. Gun show loopholes must be stopped. Ammunition should not be sold online. Mandatory wait periods should be enforced during which time a thorough background check, psychological and medical evaluation and character references should be completed. More accountability should be placed in the hands of retailers. When patrons refuse wait periods, authorities should be notified. Training and testing should be mandatory, as should a renewal process that includes many of the above-mentioned evaluation terms.

Gun owners and non-gun owners need to come together and agree on regulations that protect the right to own a firearm for sane, responsible adults and keep them out of the hands of the mentally unstable.

I, for one, would most definitely be willing to submit myself to these terms when it’s easier for me to go to a gun show and pick up a firearm than it is for me to go to the local pharmacy and buy cold medication. Acquiring and owning a gun should be at least as controlled as getting a learner’s permit, license and privilege to drive a car.

Gun control alone is not the whole of the solution, but it’s a start. And if it keeps guns out of the hands of even one mentally unstable person and saves one sweet life, it’s worth it.

On December 14, 2012, a gunman entered the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut and opened fire, killing 26 people, 20 of whom were children. Completely innocent unarmed victims.

Columbine. Red Lake Minnesota. Essex Vermont. Lancaster. Aurora. Virginia Tech. To name a few. How many more innocents must die at the hands of an antiquated and oft-misinterpreted amendment? Enough.

It’s time to stop the violence.

Gun Control doesn’t have to mean no guns. I’m not suggesting we take guns away. I’m suggesting we put tighter controls on acquiring and owning them. Gun show loopholes must be stopped. Ammunition should not be sold online. Mandatory wait periods should be enforced during which time a thorough background check, psychological and medical evaluation and character references should be completed. More accountability should be placed in the hands of retailers. When patrons refuse wait periods, authorities should be notified. Training and testing should be mandatory, as should a renewal process that includes many of the above-mentioned evaluation terms.

Gun owners and non-gun owners need to come together and agree on regulations that protect the right to own a firearm for sane, responsible adults and keep them out of the hands of the mentally unstable.

I, for one, would most definitely be willing to submit myself to these terms when it’s easier for me to go to a gun show and pick up a firearm than it is for me to go to the local pharmacy and buy cold medication. Acquiring and owning a gun should be at least as controlled as getting a learner’s permit, license and privilege to drive a car.

Gun control alone is not the whole of the solution, but it’s a start. And if it keeps guns out of the hands of even one mentally unstable person and saves one sweet life, it’s worth it.

Obama urges solidarity as America mourns shooting victims

 

President Barack Obama urged Americans on Saturday to join in solidarity as they mourn the victims of a shooting rampage at a Connecticut elementary school, saying the hearts of parents across the country were “heavy with hurt” for the lives lost.

In his weekly radio and Internet speech, Obama also repeated a message he put forth on Friday, just hours after one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history, on the need to set aside politics and “take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this.”

But Obama went no further than that, and again stopped short of specifically calling for tighter gun-control laws.

Twenty children were killed by a heavily armed gunman who opened fire at a school in Newtown, Connecticut, on Friday. He killed at least 26 people there before turning his gun on himself.

“We grieve for the families of those we lost. And we keep in our prayers the parents of those who survived,” Obama said.

The shooting spree reignited a debate over gun-control in a country with a flourishing gun culture and a strong gun lobby, which has discouraged most politicians from any major efforts to address the easy availability of firearms.

Obama mostly steered clear of the issue during his successful re-election campaign this year, and it remains unclear whether he might be willing to take a more assertive approach now that he has secured a second term.

OBAMA URGED TO ACT

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who runs a coalition of mayors on gun policy, said on Friday the Democratic president should press ahead despite likely opposition from Republicans who control the U.S. House of Representatives.

“We have heard all the rhetoric before. What we have not seen is leadership – not from the White House and not from Congress. That must end today,” Bloomberg said in a statement.

Ticking off some of the recent shooting incidents, Obama said in his Saturday address: “As a nation, we have endured far too many of these tragedies in the last few years.”

His response to previous high-profile shootings was to call for a national conversation on how to curb gun violence.

“This weekend, Michelle and I are doing what I know every parent is doing – holding our children as close as we can and reminding them how much we love them,” he said.

“There are families in Connecticut who can’t do that today. And they need all of us now,” he said. “All of us can extend a hand to those in need – to remind them that we are there for them, that we are praying for them.”

The 20-year-old gunman, who law enforcement sources identified as Adam Lanza, opened fire on a classroom at Sandy Hook Elementary School, which serves children from ages 5 to 10.

Authorities found 18 children and seven adults, including the gunman, dead at the school, and two children were pronounced dead later after being take to a hospital.

“Most of those who died were just young children with their whole lives ahead of them. And every parent in America has a heart heavy with hurt,” Obama said.

Obama had to struggle to control his emotions during his televised statement on Friday in the White House briefing where his voice cracked and he wiped away tears.

Partisan bickering in Washington, divided by a battle over a looming “fiscal cliff” of tax hikes and spending cuts, was put on hold amid mourning for the Connecticut dead.

House Speaker John Boehner, the top Republican in Congress, said he had canceled the Republican weekly address for Saturday “so that President Obama can speak for the entire nation at this time of mourning.”

Obama’s $447 billion reelection plan

Image via Wikipedia

There’s been much speculation that President Barack Obama will spend $1 billion to get reelected. Turns out those guesses were off by $446 billion.

What Americans heard last night was a $447 billion political plan, not an economic one. It’s purpose was to a) fire up the demoralized Democratic base and b) show independents that Obama is trying to do something – anything – to reduce unemployment, not just slash needed “investment” like those heartless, pro-austerity Republicans.

Now all the usual suspects will claim the American Jobs Act will create more growth and more jobs through $250 billion in temporary payroll tax cuts and $200 billion in infrastructure spending, unemployment benefits and aid to state and local government.

Take Moody’s economist Mark Zandi, a favorite of the White House and congressional Democrats. Zandi’s research says the original $800 billion Obama stimulus created or saved some 2-3 million jobs. And he likes Stimulus 2.0 just as much. He claims it would “add two percentage points to GDP growth next year, add 1.9 million jobs, and cut the unemployment rate by a percentage point.”

Really? Seriously?

1) Of course, such analysis is based on garbage in, garbage out, Keynesian economic models. The results were already baked into the cake.  Better to see what actually happened as gleaned from government statistics. In a recent paper, Stanford University economist John Taylor simply looked at whether, as a result of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, consumers actually consumed and whether government actually spent in a way that produced real growth and jobs. Turns out, they didn’t:

Individuals and families largely saved the transfers and tax rebates. The federal government increased purchases, but by only an immaterial amount. State and local governments used the stimulus grants to reduce their net borrowing (largely by acquiring more financial assets) rather than to increase expenditures, and they shifted expenditures away from purchases toward transfers. Some argue that the economy would have been worse off without these stimulus packages, but the results do not support that view.

2) Economists from George Mason University also looked at the real-world results of  the ARRA by surveying employers. Their findings:

Hiring isn’t the same as net job creation. In our survey, just 42.1 percent of the workers hired at ARRA-receiving organizations after January 31, 2009, were unemployed at the time they were hired. More were hired directly from other organizations (47.3 percent of post-ARRA workers), while a handful came from school (6.5%) or from outside the labor force (4.1%). Thus, there was an almost even split between “job creating” and “job switching.” This suggests just how hard it is for Keynesian job creation to work in a modern, expertise-based economy: even in a weak economy, organizations hired the employed about as often as the unemployed.

3) And let’s not forget what Milton Friedman might have to say about this sort of deal, which gets to the heart of why Keynesian stimulus doesn’t work (via Wikipedia):

The permanent income hypothesis (PIH) is a theory of consumption that was developed by the American economist Milton Friedman. In its simplest form, the hypothesis states that the choices made by consumers regarding their consumption patterns are determined not by current income but by their longer-term income expectations. The key conclusion of this theory is that transitory, short-term changes in income have little effect on consumer spending behavior.

Team Obama thinks the whole package could boost growth by two percentage points. But the  infrastructure spending and unemployment benefits will be a tougher sell. Republicans may well substitute their own stimulus ideas for those items so that the package ends up composed entirely of tax cuts.

The most likely addition is a temporary reduction in the taxes on foreign earnings brought back to the U.S. by its multinational corporations. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates such a tax holiday could boost growth by a full percentage point next year. White House economists criticize idea as providing too little bang for the buck, but it could be the price for getting a deal. But an agreement can get probably get done, which would enhance perception of Obama as a leader and boost his approval ratings. Just don’t expect it to do much for America’s sputtering economic recovery.

Related articles

• Economists show support for Obama job-growth plan (seattlepi.com)
• Obama Tax Cut Plan would boost typical pay – Mostly a smoke and mirrors plan (pobeptsworld.wordpress.com)
• Obama speech: Will his jobs plan work? – Christian Science Monitor (news.google.com)
• Obama speech: Will his jobs plan work? (csmonitor.com)
• The morning briefing: White House points to Zandi (whitehouse.blogs.cnn.com)