California now has the highest poverty rate in the nation.

Success! California now has the highest poverty rate in the nation.

California’s state legislature and governorship have both been held by the Democrats for years. Both have repeatedly raised taxes. Both have repeatedly failed to balance the state’s budget. And both have been and continue to be eager to increase government regulation on the state’s citizenry. What could go wrong?

Update: In related news, Los Angeles’ film and television industry has lost 16,100 jobs in past seven years, mostly due to businesses leaving the state.

Hostess Brands — already in bankruptcy — has decided to shut down because one of its unions refused to end a strike.

Be careful what you wish for: Hostess Brands — already in bankruptcy — has decided to shut down because one of its unions refused to end a strike.

The closing will result in Hostess’ nearly 18,500 workers losing their jobs as the company shuts 33 bakeries and 565 distribution centers nationwide, as well as 570 outlet stores. The Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union represents around 5,000 Hostess employees. “We deeply regret the necessity of today’s decision, but we do not have the financial resources to weather an extended nationwide strike,” said CEO Gregory Rayburn in a statement.

So, because 5,000 union workers wanted more from a company that had nothing more to give, 18,500 lose their jobs, including those same union workers.

Sounds sensible, and right in line with most leftwing math.

The Democratic senator seeking the chairmanship of the Senate Budget Committee has refused to promise to write a budget next year.

What Americans apparently wanted: The Democratic senator seeking the chairmanship of the Senate Budget Committee has refused to promise to write a budget next year.

This will be the fourth year in a row that the Democrats in the Senate have failed to write a budget. And note, they don’t need a single Republican vote to do it, since budget bills cannot be fillibusted.

As I like to say, the day of reckoning looms.

Bankruptcy

It appears that Barack Obama has won another four years in office. Despite what many consider to be one of the weakest and most incompetent presidencies in history, the American people have decided to stick with this man. Even worse, the Democrats look like they will gain seats in the Senate, even though it was the Democratic majority in that Senate that has refused to pass a budget — as required by law — for the last three years. For that dereliction of duty, the American people have decided to reward them with more power.

Overall, it appears that the polls that favored Democrats in their sampling were actually capturing the tone of the country. The public wants big government and a restriction in freedom. 2010 was a fluke, not a trend. I was wrong.

We are stuck with Obamacare. We are stuck with trillion dollar deficits. We are stuck with bankruptcy. I have little hope now for the near future. It will probably take fifty years or more to fix the problems that the past four years and the next four years will create.

This is not even a conservative perspective. No policy can survive, even good leftwing policy, when the government is bankrupt. And with trillion dollar deficits the new normal, we are guaranteed that the government will go bankrupt. And it will take everything else down with it.

Even worse, this willingness of the American public and its intellectual class to ignore this reality, to make believe that trillion dollar deficits don’t matter, suggests an intellectual bankruptcy that is even more appalling. For you can’t fix a problem if you refuse to face it.

The federal government is expected to hit its debt ceiling before the end of the year.

The day of reckoning looms: The federal government is expected to hit its debt ceiling before the end of the year.

The federal government is bankrupting the country, and it will take hard sacrifices to rein in that federal government. I fear that, regardless of how today’s election ends, neither party will be willing to propose those sacrifices, mostly because they will believe the voters are not willing either.

The long term credit rating of the United States was lowered today by Standard and Poors.

The day of reckoning looms: The long term credit rating of the United States was lowered today by Standard and Poors.

The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics. More broadly, the downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges to a degree more than we envisioned when we assigned a negative outlook to the rating on April 18, 2011.

The modern leftwing disconnect from reality.

The modern leftwing disconnect from reality.

[L]ast week a man called Floyd Corkins shot another man called Leo Johnson, the security guard at the Family Research Council, a “conservative” group, according to the muted media coverage, or a “hate group,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, who spray that term around like champagne on a NASCAR podium. Mr. Corkins, an “LGBT volunteer,” told his victim, “I don’t like your politics.” In his backpack, he had one box of ammunition and 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches. Had he had one Chick-fil-A sandwich and 15 boxes of ammunition, he might have done more damage. Or then again perhaps not, given that, as bloggers Kathy Shaidle and “the Phantom” pointed out, he reached his target and then started “monologuing,” as they say in The Incredibles….

I’m not blaming Floyd Corkins’s actions on the bullying twerps at the Southern Poverty Law Center or those thug Democrat mayors who tried to run Chick-fil-A out of Boston and Chicago. But I do think he’s the apotheosis of narcissistic leftist myopia. He symbolizes that exhaustion of the other possibilities — the dwindling down of latter-day liberalism to ever more self-indulgent distractions from the hard truths of a broke and ruined landscape. Our elites have sunk into a boutique decadence of moral preening entirely disconnected from reality: A non-homophobic chicken in every pot, an abortifacient dispenser in every Catholic university, a high-speed-rail corridor between every two bankrupt California municipalities.

Read the whole thing. Steyn once again notes the bankruptcy of modern liberalism and the Democratic Party, which — unless the American public rejects it — will lead to the bankruptcy of our country and probably the world.

“Ignore the political prophets of doom – this is a golden age for the world.”

“Ignore the prophets of doom – this is a golden age for the world.”

Take global poverty, a subject we have heard plenty about from ministers justifying the £9 billion overseas aid budget. Britain has signed up to the so-called Millennium Development Goals, set in 2000 and accompanied by sermons from Gordon Brown about the “arc of the moral universe” bending towards justice. It was the beginning of boom times for the overseas aid industry, despite its woeful track record. The first goal was to halve the proportion of the world’s population living on a dollar a day by 2015 – an undeniably noble aim.

Earlier this year, the World Bank made an astonishing discovery: the target had actually been met in 2008, seven years ahead of schedule. This staggering achievement received no fanfare, perhaps because the miracle had not been created by Western governments but by the economic progress of China and India. Their embrace of capitalism had invited a flow of trade and investment, which was not halted by the crash. Capitalism meant that houses replaced mud huts and vast swathes of the Third World rose from their agrarian knees. British consumers buying cheap shirts in Asda were, in a very real sense, helping to make poverty history. [emphasis mine]

In other words, poor countries became wealthy by embracing freedom, not centralized government rule.

Sadly, the United States still faces economic disaster, and that is because, in the past half century, our culture abandoned its principles of freedom and capitalism and instead put our faith in big government. The result: we now face bankruptcy and economic collapse.

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