It's becoming increasingly difficult to discern fact from fiction, and unfortunately the media has a strong bias. They spin stories to make conservatives look bad and will go to great lengths to avoid reporting on the good that comes from conservative policies. There are a few shining lights in the media landscape-brave conservative outlets that report the truth and offer a different perspective. We must support conservative outlets like this one and ensure that our voices are heard.

Sunday, April 29, 2012

List of countries by economic freedom

This article includes a List of countries by economic freedom.

	overall score	change from previous		country	overall score	change from previous
1	Hong Kong	89.9	+0.2	4	New Zealand	82.1	-0.2
2	Singapore	87.5	+0.3	5	Switzerland	81.1	-0.8
3	Australia	83.1	+0.6

Economic Freedom of the World 2011 Annual Report

Read more: http://www.freetheworld.com/release.html

Head Start: A tragic waste of money

Head Start, the most sacrosanct federal education program, doesn't work.
That's the finding of a sophisticated study just released by President Obama's Department of Health and Human Services.
Created in 1965, the comprehensive preschool program for 3- and 4-year olds and their parents is meant to narrow the education gap between low-income students and their middle- and upper-income peers. Forty-five years and $166 billion later, it has been proven a failure.
The bad news came in the study released this month: It found that, by the end of the first grade, children who attended Head Start are essentially indistinguishable from a control group of students who didn't.

What's so damning is that this study used the best possible method to review the program: It looked at a nationally representative sample of 5,000 children who were randomly assigned to either the Head Start ("treatment") group or to the non-Head Start ("control") group. Random assignment is the "gold standard" of medical and social-science research: It gives investigators confidence that the treatment and control groups are essentially identical in every respect except their access to Head Start. So if eventual test performances differ, we can be pretty sure that the difference was caused by the program. No previous study of Head Start used this approach on a nationally representative sample of children.

Head Start Impact Study

Mandated by Congress in 1998 amendments to The Head Start Act, the Head Start Impacts Study evaluated he effects of Head Start on children and families through the childrens' first year of school. The study followed a nationally representative sample of nearly 5,000 children in 84 Head Start programs. Findings of the study, which began in 2002 and ended in 2006, were released January 13, 2010.

Read more: http://www.nhsa.org/research/head_start_impact_study

The Bernanke Bust, the why how and when

To readers of THE CONTRARIAN TAKE, it will come as no surprise that we are fond of the Austrian School’s take on monetary matters, specifically the unintended consequences of monetary largesse – economic busts.
To Austrians, ALL economic “booms” founded on monetary largesse ALWAYS end in economic busts, roughly equal in size and intensity to the preceding booms. By distorting interest rate and price signals and, as a consequence, creating malinvestments that must eventually be liquidated, monetary booms NECESSITATE economic busts. This is true regardless of whatever short-term benefits the economy and/or financial markets appear to enjoy from this largesse. And whether that largesse originates via the creation of central bank base money (through central bank asset purchase and/or loan programs) or via bank-issued on-demand deposit liabilities in excess of bank reserves or what Austrians call uncovered money substitutes (when said banks are making loans and/or purchasing assets), in the end the result is always economic busts.
Our broad and preferred money supply metric – TMS2 (True “Austrian” Money Supply) – posted another double digit year-over-year rate increase in March, this one coming in at 14.5%. That makes 40 consecutive months of double digit year-over-year rate increases. To state the obvious, we are in the midst of a monetary explosion.

Read more: http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpollaro/2012/04/27/the-bernanke-bust-the-why-how-and-when/

Telling Strength From Weakness

Politicians who wrote the Dodd-Frank law insist that it eliminates the dangers posed by large, politically connected financial institutions. At a news conference last week, Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, said that higher capital and greater liquidity requirements for big banks, combined with more watchful regulators, were making our financial giants stronger and less likely to require taxpayer backstops.

Outside the Beltway, however, it is hardly clear that we’ve resolved this signal threat. Big banks are bigger than ever, and they exert enormous power over regulators and lawmakers. Increasingly, smaller institutions can’t compete.

So it was refreshing last week to hear Kevin M. Warsh, a former Fed governor, speak candidly and critically about the government backing that continues to support our largest banks. Equally refreshing were his prescriptions for eliminating the too-big-to-fail problem.

“We cannot have a durable, competitive, dynamic banking system that facilitates economic growth if policy protects the franchises of oligopolies atop the financial sector,” Mr. Warsh told an audience at the Stanford Law School on Wednesday night. “Those ‘interconnected’ firms that find themselves dependent on implicit government support do not serve our economy’s interest.”

Top five cliches that liberals use to avoid real arguments

One of the great differences between conservatives and liberals is that conservatives will freely admit that they have an ideology. We’re kind of dorks that way, squabbling over old texts like Dungeons and Dragons geeks, wearing ties with pictures of Adam Smith and Edmund Burke on them.
But mainstream liberals from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama — and the intellectuals and journalists who love them — often assert that they are simply dispassionate slaves to the facts; they are realists, pragmatists, empiricists. Liberals insist that they live right downtown in the “reality-based community,” and if only their Republican opponents weren’t so blinded by ideology and stupidity, then they could work with them.
This has been a theme of Obama’s presidency from the start. A couple of days before his inauguration,Obama proclaimed: “What is required is a new declaration of independence, not just in our nation, but in our own lives — from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry” (an odd pronouncement, given that “bigoted” America had just elected its first black president).
In his inaugural address, he explained that “the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.”

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/top-five-cliches-liberals-use-to-avoid-real-arguments/2012/04/27/gIQAFR1zlT_story.html?wprss=rss_opinions

Regrets, but no apology

Saying they had regrets, but without apologizing directly, the federal government’s lawyers have admitted to the Supreme Court that the partial victory they won in a case three years ago was based on flawed information they had given to the Court. They filed a letter Tuesday “in order to clarify and correct” that information. The Court need not do anything about it, the letter suggested.

The problem with the information, supplied in the 2009 case of Nken v. Holder (docket 08-681), was not turned up by the government. Rather, it turned up in a federal court in New York City when immigrants’ rights attorneys demanded an explanation for a policy statement on which the Supreme Court had relied in deciding the Nken case. The policy that the goverrment had told the Court existed apparently did not exist. (This controversy over what the Justices had been told by the government was discussed on this blog in this post in February.)
In the new letter to the Court, Deputy Solicitor General Michael R. Dreeben did not concede that the information provided in the government brief in that case was actually wrong. Rather, it said, the information was designed to “encapsulate” information gleaned within the government as the brief was being prepared. “The government,” the letter said, “should have provided a more complete and precise explanation.”
The Nken decision came down three years ago this month. Lately, the government had been resisting — in a federal District Court in New York City — the forced disclosure of an exchange of e-mails that supposedly was in the background of the information supplied to the Justices in Nken. The District judge had ordered the government to hand over at least parts of those e-mails, and the government earlier this month challenged that ruling in an appeal to the Second Circuit Court.

Read more: http://www.scotusblog.com/2012/04/regrets-but-no-apology/

Our System Is So Flawed That Fraud Is Mathematically Guaranteed: Bill Black

Bill Black is a former bank regulator who played a central role in prosecuting the corruption responsible for the S&L crisis of the late 1980s. He is one of America's top experts on financial fraud. And he laments that the US has descended into a type of crony capitalism that makes continued fraud a virtual certainty - while increasingly neutering the safeguards intended to prevent and punish such abuse.
In this extensive interview, Bill explains why financial fraud is the most damaging type of fraud and also the hardest to prosecute. He also details how, through crony capitalism, it has become much more prevalent in our markets and political system.
A warning: there's much revealed in this interview to make your blood boil. For example: the Office of Thrift Supervision. In the aftermath of the S&L crisis, this office brought 3,000 administration enforcements actions (a.k.a. lawsuits) against identified perpetrators. In a number of cases, they clawed back the funds and profits that the convicted parties had fraudulently obtained.
Flash forward to the 2008 credit crisis, in which just the related household sector losses alone were over 70x greater than those seen during the entire S&L debacle. So how many criminal referrals did the same agency, the Office of Thrift Supervision, make?
Zero.

Similar dismal action was taken by such other financial regulators as the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal reserve and the FDIC.
Where is the accountability?, you may be asking. Or perhaps, how did we allow things to get this bad?

Read more: http://beforeitsnews.com/story/2076/554/Our_System_Is_So_Flawed_That_Fraud_Is_Mathematically_Guaranteed:_Bill_Black.html

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