The truth is that money is not an evil toxic sludge, whose stain the Left works to scour from our souls. Money is the mechanism that allows you to spend your time doing what you’re best at – which produces wealth, the same way a lever amplifies muscle to move great weights. You spend the money you earn each day on a range of products you couldn’t possibly create for yourself. You probably couldn’t create a decent pair of shoes in the hours it takes you to earn enough money to purchase them. You definitely couldn’t cobble a computer system together from nothing but raw materials, in the time it takes you to earn a thousand dollars and buy one. This is the genesis of wealth: the freedom enjoyed by people when the value of their time can be measured and traded through currency.

***

We have to do more than just whip Big Government into fighting shape. We must begin devolving the functions of the federal government to the states. We don’t need rivers of tax money pouring into Washington, then trickling back to the states, polluted with frozen chunks of mandate. Let the states handle the financing for these functions… and let state politicians directly face those whose taxes pay for them. The national Congress places too much money in the hands of representatives most taxpayers will never have a chance to vote against.

The Cato Institute has launched a new website that includes a roadmap for downsizing the Federal Government.  It’s appropriately called www.downsizinggovernment.org.

They have applied a common sense approach to the Federal budget, and have identified specific areas and programs that should be cut.

Some of their suggestions may seem radical at first blush, but each proposal has been put through the filter of the Constitution, and a lot of the items are not so much cut, but rather shifted to the states, where the programs can be administered locally by people who understand local issues.  (And, I must note, when we’ve started routinely talking about spending TRILLIONS of dollars we don’t have, I think it’s time for radical.)

For instance, they propose eliminating both the Department of Education, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.  Both departments exist almost solely for redistributing money from one set of people to another through a complicated set of rules.

Instead of sending a bunch of cash to D.C., and then begging for it back, we could just skip that whole thing and pay the money directly to the state or local governments.

As of today, the project has only completed reviews of 5 federal departments.  There are many more to come.

I look forward to their suggestions, specifically since some of the tougher departments (Homeland Security, Defense) have yet to be reviewed.

Here’s hoping that a nation that was drunk on HopeNChange in 2008 seeks out real reform in 2010 and 2012.  We’re certainly on an unsustainable path, and it’s about time we did something about it.

President Obama will visit Australia next month.  The trip coincides with the 70th anniversary of US-Australian diplomatic relations.  So, if you do the math, that puts the establishment of relations at 1940.

Prior to 1901, Australia consisted of six self governing British colonies.  Through a process called Federation, the colonies joined together and became the Commonwealth of Australia.  From 1901 to 1940-ish, Australia was in a transition period.  Around the WWII era they became fully self governing, though they still consider the British Monarch to be their head of state.

You can never have enough…

No shock that the name in question is Cyrus.  You’ll have to click the link for the pictures, if you can stomach it.

Good luck…  not bragging (actually, yes I am) but I got all 12 right this time.

“Inspection of the vulva showed no vagina, only a shallow skin dimple,” so doctors delivered a healthy baby boy via Caesarean, the authors wrote in a case report published in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.

***

Yet by looking at her records the hospital staff realized the young woman was in the hospital 278 days earlier with a knife wound to her stomach. The average pregnancy lasts 280 days. After interviews, they gathered that “Just before she was stabbed in the abdomen she had practiced fellatio with her new boyfriend and was caught in the act by her former lover. The fight with knives ensued.”

The girl arrived at the hospital with an empty stomach — and therefore with little stomach acid around — and doctors found two holes from a stab wound that opened her stomach up to her abdominal cavity. The case report said doctors washed her stomach out with a salt solution and stitched her up.

Jenny Sanford is the soon-to-be ex-wife of Mark Sanford, the Governor of South Carolina.  He made headlines a few months ago when he was “hiking the Appalachian Trail,” which apparently means admiring your “soul mate’s” tan lines in Argentina.

Jenny has a book out now, and is doing some media to promote it.  She talked to Barbara Walters the other day.

Among the many revelations from the interview was this:

South Carolina first lady Jenny Sanford recalls how she made the “leap of faith” to marry husband Gov. Mark Sanford even though the groom refused to promise to be faithful, insisting that the clause be removed from their wedding vows.
A Barbara Walters interview, this Friday on 20/20 10/9c.

“It bothered me to some extent, but … we were very young, we were in love,” she said in an exclusive interview with Barbara Walters to air on “20/20″ Friday. “I questioned it, but I got past it … along with other doubts that I had.”

Uh… Jenny?  When a guy goes out of his way to remove the faithful clause in your wedding vows, that’s what we call a big flashing warning sign.  (By the way, you were 27 when you were married.  You had graduated from college.  That hardly counts as “very young.”)

From the rest of the interview, it seems like Mark has always been a nut.

“He drew me a picture of a half a bike, and then for the next birthday or Christmas I got the picture of the other half a bike, and then he delivered the $25 used bike,” she recalled.

For another birthday, Mark Sanford gave her a diamond necklace, which she adored, but then he took it back.

I’m just glad the implosion happened when it did, since this guy had “rising star” status in the GOP.  I’m glad his star was quashed before he did too much damage.  (Just goes to show you, nuts can be fiscal conservatives too.)

I’m not excusing Mark’s behavior here, but Jenny, really, what did you expect?

Anyone who knows me knows that I don’t have a very high opinion of college.  The education system in this country leaves much to be desired.  We tend to push people who don’t belong in higher education along to college.  They can’t handle it, they drop out, and they make the process worse for the people who should be there.

When you marry that with a pathetic K-12 system, colleges have now become really expensive versions of high school.

I could go on and on about what needs to happen to fix our education system, but I won’t, for now.  What I really wanted to do is highlight this piece from the Wall Street Journal.  It starts this way:

For years, higher education was touted as a safe path to professional and financial success. Easy money, in the form of student loans, flowed to help parents and students finance degrees, with the implication that in the long run, a bachelor’s degree was a good bet. Graduates, it has long been argued, would be able to build solid careers that would earn them far more than their high-school educated counterparts.

Several figures have been thrown around related to the lifetime earning potential of those with and without college degrees.  The consensus was that college graduates would earn about $1 million dollars more over their lifetime.

Well, the issue is that those estimates didn’t take into account the whole picture.  This guy thinks he has a better number:

Dr. Schneider estimated the actual lifetime-earnings advantage for college graduates is a mere $279,893 in a report he wrote last year. He included tuition payments and discounted earning streams, putting them into present value. He also used actual salary data for graduates 10 years after they completed their degrees to measure incomes. Even among graduates of top-tier institutions, the earnings came in well below the million-dollar mark, he says.

Assuming a 45 year career, that works out to about $6,000 a year.  Not chump change,  but not an astronomical amount, either.

After over a decade working in business, I think I can boil it down to this: You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.

Or, said differently, a loser with a college degree is still a loser.

I worked with many, many, people who felt that their degree entitled them to more money or a higher position.  The problem was that they lacked any real skills or work ethic.  They couldn’t write intelligible emails.  They had no vision.  They had no follow through.  They were still losers, but they had a really expensive piece of paper that they felt entitled them to more money.

And they usually quit to go work at a restaurant or languished in their entry level position for years.

It’s not that I don’t see a place for higher education in our society.  I certanly wouldn’t hire a Chemical Engineer or a Doctor without a degree.  But for a large majority of jobs out there, all a college degree does is give you a lot of debt and take you out of the workforce for 4-6 years.

As some people are learning the hard way:

And just like any investment, there are risks—such as graduating into a deep economic downturn. That’s what happened to Kelly Dunleavy, who graduated in 2007 from the University of California, Berkeley, with $60,000 in loans. She now works as a reporter for a small newspaper in the Bay Area and earns $34,000 a year. Her father is currently paying her $700 monthly loan payments. “It’s harder than what I think I expected it to be,” she says.

Unfortunately, HR departments across the country have not quite realized this, and the truth is that many companies have ridiculous and artificial rules about hiring people without degrees.

So until we get some real, radical reform in our education system, expect a lot of pigs with lipstick running around with a sense of entitlement.  Just don’t expect to be able to read their emails.