New Jersey Is the 4th Worst State for Business

No wonder, New Jersey drops one spot to 48th. Now it's the 4th worst state for doing business.

According to Steve Lonegan, here are the 5 worst business laws in New Jersey (apart from the tax laws):

Paid Family Leave, Project Labor Agreements, Binding Arbitration, Card Check and the $500 S-Corporation Tax.

“Paid Family Leave is a new government program financed by an income tax on working people to pay other people not to work,” Lonegan said. “It is typical of the silly ‘feel-good’ legislation liberals pass because they have no comprehension of what it is like to run a business and make ends meet.”

Lonegan called Project Labor Agreements, where union wages must be paid on all government projects and Binding Arbitration for municipal labor negotiations “two of the reasons property taxes have skyrocketed in recent years and that affects businesses bottom line.”

New Jersey’s “Card Check” law -- a model for legislation being pushed by the Obama Administration today -- would end secret ballots in union elections and replace them with a system where union organizers can intimidate workers into supporting a union merely by signing a membership card.

“This so-called ‘reform’ takes Union elections from an American-style process to the type seen in Cuba where thugs and goons insure people vote ‘correctly’.”

Lonegan said the worst of all the anti-business laws was the McGreevey $500 S-Corporation tax. “This penalizes the job creator who is starting their business because you pay this tax even if your company loses money,” Lonegan said. “That’s not only wrong, it single-handedly tells an untold number of our residents not to bother starting your own business and that’s the wrong approach to take.”

Obama's Ignorance on History

The latest from our stupid president: "There has never been a Secretary of the Treasury, except maybe Alexander Hamilton, right after the Revolutionary War, who's had to deal with the multiplicity of issues that Secretary Geithner is having to deal with"

I recommend Obama to get a history book and learn that the Revolutionary War ended in 1783, and Hamilton became Treasury Secretary in 1789. That's 6 years, not "right after".

AIG, Bonuses and Government

Of course everyone is outraged now about the 150 millions in bonuses that AIG employees are receiving. After all, the company received 180 billions of taxpayer money, and we are paying their bonuses. But the democrats should be the last to be outraged. After all, it's Chris Dodd's amendment to the bailout bill that guaranteed all bonuses that were part of contracts made before the bill went into effect. So it's a specific amendment introduced by Dodd dealing with this, just to make it clear. The reasons shouldn't be hard to guess. Chris Dodd together with Barrack Obama are the biggest beneficiaries of AIG contributions in the last election cycle. As for the recipients of bonuses, of course they deserve it. After all, they worked together and earned the company 180 billions even when the businesses was going into the ground. Let me tell you, if any of you can get me 10 millions in Government money for my company, I promise you a $100k bonus!

And why would Obama's people be mad at this? After all, those employees receive this money (which comes from the Government), and they'll use it to buy cars, maybe a new home, and other consumer products, thus stimulating the economy. Isn't this that the new Keynesian push is all about? I don't agree with it, but it's the new adminstration's policy. Or maybe, like Dick Morris said, Obama is not only a socialist, but an incompetent socialist.

I think all this scandal about the bonuses is just a distraction to hide the real horror: about 93 billions of the bailout money has been paid to other banks, especially European banks. So in the end, we the taxpayers bailed out the Europeans. The bonuses represent less than 0.1% of the bailout (and they reutrn into our economy), while the amounts transfered to Europe make up more than 50%.

And one more thing. AIG is now owned 80% by the Government. All this, bonuses and foreign transfers, happened on the Government watch. AIG's CEO, Edward Liddy, is a Government appointee who doesn't receive a salary from AIG, because he is a federal bureaucrat. This should serve as the beste xample of how good the Government is at running a business. The same Government that couldn't even run a restaurant inside the Capitol. Just wait until the Government starts building cars and deciding on your treatment options...

The Truth About Socialism

Jeffrey Folks wrote a remarkable article in American Thinker, titled My Socialist Past. It strikes a particular cord with me because I spent 14 years under communism and another 10 under quasi-socialism. I recommend you read it in its entirety, because it explains everything that's wrong with socialism. I can help with further explanation for those who still don't get it. My former country of Romania experimented about 50 years with socialism, and some of our neighbors even longer. They all failed miserably. Here are a few excerpts from Mr. Folks' article:

Anyone who has lived inside the demoralized, unproductive, gray prison of a communist state, as I did in the mid-1980s, knows to what depths of impoverishment the egalitarian fantasies of socialism inevitably lead. They lead to decades of frustrated poverty and lifetimes of untreated illness culminating in early death. I remember the columns of death notices for men and women in their forties and fifties that appeared in the local newspaper. Gradually I learned to associate those death notices with the lack of fresh foodstuffs, the travesty of state health care, and the pervasive demoralization of an enslaved population drowning itself in cheap alcohol and cigarettes.

Unnumbered lives were sacrificed on the ungodly altar of communism in the last century, not only in my temporary abode of Yugoslavia but throughout eastern Europe, Russia, and much of Asia, Africa, and South America, and now the American Left wishes to revive this monstrous ideology on our own shores. Every totalitarian regime begins with the same heartfelt promises of justice and equality, just those promises of fairness that Barack Obama has made the fixation of his political career. What tyrant, one might ask, has not risen to power on promises of benevolent change?

Soon, however, those who come to power, even with good intentions, discover that for all men to be made equal, some men must be made poor, and most men will not agree to be made poor in the absence of force. So force must be applied, assets must be seized, censorship must be imposed, dissidents must be jailed, enemies must be destroyed. Men must be made equal by any means necessary, and soon enough those means include intimidation, imprisonment, and execution.

Under socialism, those who are lazy and unproductive, or not productive at all, or even blatantly destructive, get a free ride; those who are skillful and enterprising are punished. When ambitious workers attempt to get ahead on the basis of their abilities, as inevitably they do, they are harassed, beaten, imprisoned, and executed. The longer that ambition is repressed, the less productive the overall economy becomes.

Socialism always stifles talent and ambition, and the more it does so, the more squalid things get. It is no accident that socialism always fails. It fails because of its fundamental assumption that self-interest can be suppressed in human relations. Socialism fails every time because of the arrogant lie upon which it rests.

Anyone who does not understand what this means has failed to study the history of the past century, especially those horrific decades of political oppression and moral collapse resulting from centralized government planning and control in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. There is nothing subjective about this notion of decline. The symptoms of this demise of civilization are all easily measured and acutely felt: they include a shrinking food supply, a decline in the quality and availability of housing, a reduction of educational standards, an attenuation of essential public services, a diminishment of private property rights, and, ultimately, a decreased life expectancy.

As astounding as it may seem, given the history of Yugoslavia and of much worse, socialism remains the dream of the American Left, and it is exactly what we are getting with the Democrats now in control of the White House and Congress. In one form or another, we will have socialized medicine, with its callous specter of long waiting lists or outright denials for life-saving operations and drugs. In one form or another, we will see government control of the energy industry, and with it ever higher prices for fuel and electricity.

Without the powerful effect of the free market, no one has any real incentive to work. If the high earners are removed at the top, the new top comes to be measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars in pay, not in millions. But if the new top becomes hundreds of thousands, why not tens of thousands? With the realization of this fact, why would any young person sacrifice so much in training for and obtaining a professional position?

Every communist regime in history has begun its rule with sweeping confiscations of private wealth and widespread nationalization of industry. How does this differ from Democratic proposals for government regulation and confiscation within the health care, financial services, and energy industries, or from their plan eventually to institute a four trillion dollar tax increase -- the result of bloated stimulus programs and rollback of President Bush's tax cuts?

The Treasury Yield Curve Makes TARP Obsolete

Larry Kudlow wrote a very good explanation on why the current recovery of the banks is not due to TARP, but to the upward-sloping Treasury yield curve.

When the Fed loosens money, and short-term rates are pulled well below long rates, banks profit enormously from the upward-sloping yield curve. This is principally because banks borrow short in order to lend long. If bankers can buy money for near zero cost, and loan it for 2, 3, or 4 percent, they’re in fat city. So the upward-sloped yield curve is the real bailout for the banking system.

Now, turn the clock back to 2006 and 2007. In those days the Treasury curve was upside down. Due to the Federal Reserve’s extremely tight credit policies, short-term rates moved well above long-term rates for an extended period, and that played a major role in producing the credit crunch. Since interest margins turned negative, the banks had to turn off the credit spigot, and all those exotic securities — like mortgage-backed bonds and various credit derivatives — could no longer be financed.

The truth is that the tightening of the money supply during periods of economic expansion will always lead to to a downward yield curve, but this is part of the economic cycles. The tightening is required to prevent inflation that would normally accompany a huge growth. It's what brings us recessions every 8-10 years. Now, it has coupled with a few other events, like the real estate bubble and the introduction of all those exotic investments, to hit banks harder than normal. But once the Fed loosened the money supply, the yield curve is turning upward, and this is what will help banks recover.

Of course "downward sloping Treasury yield curve" doesn't have the same impact as "predatory lenders", "evil CEOs", or "failed Bush administration", so politicians and media pundits will keep hammering the latter.

Taliban Lawyer Nominated to the Justice Department

There is a pattern starting to show up here. It's not even unbelievable anymore. Here's the latest one from the Obaministration: American Taliban's lawyer was nominated to head the Justice Department’s Civil Division.

A couple of days ago I was joking that Bernie Madoff meets all the requirements to be nominated to the SEC... It doesn't even sound like a joke anymore.

John Murtha is the Crook of the Day

I remember how someone was laughing that on the cover of The Soprano State there's a sticker now saying "Updated With The Latest Scandals", saying that book can turn into a daily newspaper. The same could be told about Obama's administration and everybody related to them.

The latest one is Rep John Murtha (D-Pa), who a few days ago was exposed in Politico:

Over the course of the past decade, Rep. John P. Murtha has earmarked millions of dollars for the Electro-Optics Center at Penn State University — money that has, in turn, gone to clients of the PMA Group, the Murtha-linked lobbying shop that was raided in November as part of a federal criminal probe.

Murtha already has a strong resume. He escaped prosecution in the Abscam scandal just by testifying against his accomplices (being as innocent as a mob rat). He's also the one who called the US military nazis who terrorize innocent people.