GOP Economic Theory Time-line

Dec. 2002 - GOP: "Deficits don't matter" - Cheney

Nov. 2010 - GOP: Debt is the most important thing on Earth. Vote us in to fix it.

Dec. 2010 - Tax-cuts for the rich are the most important thing on Earth. If the rich don't get enough beemers, they won't be motivated to give you middle-class slobs a job.

More Teabonics

Billionaire Buffett Says Tax Cuts for Rich Not Necessary

The second wealthiest person in the US, Warren Buffett, rebutted claims that the Obama administration is unjustly hurting business orders with high taxes by saying that in fact, the wealthy have never had it so good.

"I think that people at the high end, people like myself, should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we've ever had it," he told ABC's Christiane Amanpour in a clip played on "This Week" on Sunday, Nov. 21st.

George Bush's Biography Out in a Unique, Creative Format

On the Con Slogan "Rewarding Losers"

Many analysts have agreed that conservative pundits and politicians have won the "slogan war". Conservatives (cons) have mastered the Madison Avenue art of charging $1.50 for a cup of flavored sugar-water using catchy slogans and imagery.

I encountered just such a slogan the other day when a con proclaimed that "the bailouts and stimulus are guaranteed to fail because they reward losers". These alleged losers include the failing banks and US states with regard to their troubled budgets. (The stimulus explicitly assisted with state budgets for teachers, cops, and firefighters.)

This theory goes that if you "bail out losers", you then encourage more of the same behavior, causing a further slide in the economy. Like most such slogans, it does have an element of truth. It's not entirely false, but rather an exaggeration. Or more specifically, it's a relatively small factor when considered against other factors.

The primary purpose of a Keynesian stimulus is pump money into the economy to spur economic activity. Think of it as monetary caffeine. Even if you give money to the so-called "losers", it still triggers circulation of money as they consume goods and services and pay employees.

Let's take an extreme example and assume we'll give some cash to a drunken bum. The bum may go buy a sandwich, a lottery ticket, and some Jack Daniels. The sandwich money helps out the deli; the lottery ticket helps out the state budget and ticket commission employees; and the Jack Daniels money helps out brewers and distributors. The money "bounces around" the economy.

True, if you keep giving money to the bum year after year, he or she is certainly less likely to get some help and clean up their life. But again this is a longer-term issue. The hurting economy is a here and now issue. We are all in the same boat. You punish both winners and losers by obsessing on incentives for losers.

It reminds me of those old cartoons where the home owner blasts apart his own house in an attempt to kill one annoying fly. Sure, you punished that evil "loser" fly, but took out everything around you to do it.

Now let's address the alternatives. One approach to a sour economy is to do nothing and let it fix itself. That didn't work so well for Hoover. Another approach is to stimulate the economy via tax-cuts. 1/3 of the stimulus plan was tax cuts, by the way. However, the problem with tax-cuts for the wealthy is that they tend not to spend it immediately, which is against the very mechanism of a stimulus. They have the luxury of storing it away until they see a good investment come along.

The poorer one is, the more likely they are to quickly spend any extra money because they have more immediate needs. That's just the nature of economic behavior; not an evil socialist plot to help out the poor. Rich people save, poor people don't, and a smart stimulus plan uses this fact.

Further, banks are infrastructure. Letting them fail could turn our business lending system on its head, making the problem worse for everybody. You don't tear up a road just because the road builders were crooks. Most of the original head honchos of the bad banks are gone anyhow.

The conservative obsession with punishment and revenge often ends up hurting the good guys also.

What the 2010 Election Results Mean

As of writing, it's one day before election results and I expect that Democrats will take a fairly big hit. Conservatives claim it means that Americans reject Keynesian economics (stimulus plans) and the new healthcare legislation.

The truth is that the new healthcare legislation has only begun to kick in and won't have any noticeable impact on the economy any time soon. Further, the unemployed have an even bigger need for healthcare insurance help during a bad economy.

What's really happening can be compared to being stuck in a deep ditch, where the ditch represents the economy. The Democrats have not been able to get the voter's car out of the ditch such that the voter is now trying a different towing company, some if it out of spite. They may not even understand why the first towing company couldn't get them out of the ditch; they just know they want to be pulled out somehow by someone. Bad economies have always been hard on incumbents, regardless of fault. The T-party movement itself wouldn't be so popular if voters were happy with the GOP.

That being said, perhaps there is no quick fix to the economy. Our stimulus was too small because Bush spent our rainy day fund. China's stimulus worked because they had saved up a nice big rainy-day fund (largely due to lopsided trading with the US).

The USA's financial infrastructure is still choking on bad home loans and probably will be for a several years. The mortgage problems also keep people from moving to new jobs in different cities because they can't sell their houses without taking a huge loss, which further clogs up the arteries of the economy and slows the natural corrective powers of worker churn.

And even profitable companies are still not hiring because they want to see consumer demand increase first. Expected consumption patterns are primarily what guide their staffing levels. Yet, consumers won't do much big spending until they feel secure in their jobs. Thus, it's a big game of chicken between consumers and producers.

Many conservatives claim that tax-cuts for the wealthy will jump-start the economy. Not likely. They didn't speed up recovery from the dot-com meltdown nor prevent another meltdown. Big-biz lobbyists have spent billions pushing that myth, and duped a lot of conservatives into thinking tax-cuts for the rich is some kind of magic economic crack. Perhaps it is, if the crack high is comparable to yet another bubble.

Reagan and the Tax Cut Myth

An article in the printed Wall Street Journal (WSJ) claimed that Ronald Reagan's tax-cuts are what stimulated the 80's economy and that the 80's boom was bigger than Clinton's 90's boom if one uses percent of adults employed as the metric.

While I agree that percent employed is a pretty good measure of jobs created, the rest of the analysis left some pretty big gaps. First, if you looked at their graph, you'd see that the 1979-1982 recession was deeper than the 1990-1992 recession. If you factor this in and ignore the steeper climb-out of the 80's recession then the difference in job growth between the Reagan boom and Clinton boom is almost nil using WSJ's own graph.

Second, the Reagan era was plagued by deficit spending, while the Clinton era ran a surplus (or at least close to it, as there are multiple metrics). Deficit spending acts as a stimulus, creating more jobs. Thus, the 80's job increase may be from deficit spending at least as much as tax cuts.

(Some Republicans blame the 80's spending on a Democratic Congress, but that doesn't change the analysis, for we are focusing on causes of job creation here, not deficit records.)

Third, most democrats are not against middle-class tax cuts. It is the ever-increasing size of the wealth class that is the problem, creating hubris and political bribery.

Glenn Beck's Nine Lies

Lie 1: The health-care bill grants insurance for dogs.

Lie 2: Less than 10 percent of Obama's Cabinet appointees have any experience in the private sector. (Most of them do, to varying degrees.)

Lie 3: Mitt Romney government health care is now bankrupting the state of Massachusetts.

Lie 4: Forty-five percent of doctors say they'll quit if health care reform passes.

Lie 5: U.S. is only country with automatic citizenship upon birth

Lie 6: Labor union president Andy Stern is the most frequent visitor at the White House. (Glenn is using old data.)

Lie 7: John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, has proposed forcing abortions and putting sterilants in the drinking water to control population.

Lie 8: $1.4 million of stimulus money was used to repair a door at Dyess AFB. Actually, the doors repaired were aircraft hangar doors and the cost was not $1.4 million. The cost was $246,000 out of $1.4 million in repairs funding.

Lie 9: Beck warned people not to go on the "cash for clunker's" government website because there is a privacy act you have to agree to before you get your cash. The agreement is allegedly that the government can access your computer and get any information on you they want. This was a lie. The privacy act that has to be agreed to is on the site for dealers participating in this program, not citizens trading in their clunkers.

Rush Blowing Smoke on Federal Wages

A few weeks ago I yet again forced myself to listen to Rush Limbaugh. One of his rants was about how allegedly useless and over-paid federal workers are. He stated:

"Productivity is a measurement that economists apply to the private sector to measure the efficiency of workers. However, the federal government does not produce anything to measure. They are merely paper-pushers. They don't produce anything that you actually use in your daily life." [Paraphrased]

Anybody who has gotten food poising will be mindful of the important role of federal food inspectors regardless if such "productivity" is measured or not. Perhaps he's upset because the feds keep oxycontin away from him?

The complaint about "paper pushing" and the idea of producing "real" products strikes me as hypocritical coming from proponents of outsourcing and lopsided trade. Our private sector has been making less and less actual product over time, and does more and more "paper pushing" and marketing and less tangible output and results. This is because manufacturing and even white-collar jobs such as software programming is being outsourced and offshored ever more by so-called "free" trade.

As far as his argument that the wages of federal workers are almost double the private sector, I've looked into them from the perspective of an information technology professional, and don't see any evidence that their pay is excessive.

As an intern for the feds once at a geology office, I did notice that the feds do hire a lot of degreed specialists, raising the average wage level. Rush was comparing the average wage of a federal worker to the average wage of the private sector. If you hire more specialists, then the average wages will indeed go up compared to say a private-sector subscription call center where most workers don't require a college degree.

As usual, Rush did NOT give a lot of detailed analysis to figure out what, where, and why. He just spots a lone figure that looks a little odd, and makes a big drama about it. His listeners witness a lot of heat but not a lot of light. For example, if the feds don't need as many specialists, then it would make sense to give some examples of what they can cut.

Fox Priorities are Not Fair and Balanced

The FoxNews website has a July 22 article titled, "White House Spent $23M of Taxpayer Money to Back Kenyan Constitution That Legalizes Abortion, GOP Reps Say."

One paragraph says:

The proposed constitution will curtail the vast powers of the Kenyan president, offering more balance among the different branches of government in an effort to bring order and stability to the political process of a nation often torn by tumultuous exchanges of power.

But most of the article focuses on the fact that the new constitution legalizes abortion. In other words, the issue of abortion is more important than a stable country. I had to check to make sure I wasn't reading a Fox parody on The Onion.

A Problem with States Rights

Rush Limbaugh once had a caller on his show who couldn't find mining work in his economically-depressed area. "There are just no jobs in my state", the caller pleaded. Rush then responded with his usual know-it-all voice, "Then Move!". "Be willing to pack up and go to where the jobs are rather than complain." (Paraphrased)

This runs smack into the conservatives' claimed importance of "states rights". One of the biggest problems with states rights is that our "dynamic" economy has forced people to move to other states to find work more often.

People are more mobile now. The 1700's "political island states" model doesn't work so smooth any more; and lopsided "free trade", a conservative trophy project, has magnified the problem by increasing economic churn, and thus location churn. It's yet another case of where one conservative idea smacks into another in a cloud of contradiction, leaving one scratching their head trying to figure out conservative logic, assuming there is such a thing.

Science Sweat Shops - Lobbyist "Shortage" Games Yet Again

Miller-McCune magazine has an article titled, The Real Science Gap, that discusses how Americans are being driven out of advanced science and math careers by cheap foreign labor and shameful university practices.

Yet, the business and institutional lobbyists keep claiming there is an "education gap" that causes American students to avoid STEM careers (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). This is a bunch of malarkey. First they gutted agriculture, then manufacturing, and now STEM and our research backbone.

It all starts out when lobbyists claim there is a "shortage" of Americans to do a particular kind of job in order to justify the hiring of non-citizens or off-shoring the work. This is all so that they can pay out lower wages for the same work. The lobbyists' shortage story is usually a lie, and objective studies usually prove them wrong.

I've personally witnessed abuses of the H-1B visa program whereby American citizens are passed over for foreign "guest" workers (see side-bar). Thus, this strikes close to home.

How are we going to have all those wonderful war machines that conservatives love so much if only our enemies know how to make them? The endless search for cheaper labor is going to bite us in the.

WSJ Econ Quiz Gimmicks - Murdoch Stretching the Truth

A Wall Street Journal opinion piece claims according to research that progressives "flunk" economic questions more often than conservatives. The implication is that conservatives are economically smarter.

First off, economics is still more art than science. The original models based on Adam Smith's ideas have proven too simplistic, and the hard parts; especially with regard to risk, bubbles, instability, and pollution; have yet to be solved.

Failure of most economists to predict the mortgage meltdown is manifestation of this knowledge gap. If their models were near perfect, they would have known about it. (A few got lucky, and did predict it, but cannot turn it into a reliable math model.)

Take the article's primary example question: "Restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable." Using a cartoon version of the Adam Smith model, the answer is generally "yes", which is how the WSJ article scores it. However, in actual practice there are often complex and unforeseen forces that simplistic models just plain miss. Conservatives tend to prefer simple sloganistic metaphors to model life, religion, and economics. Progressives on the other hand tend to view life as more complicated and intertwined, and are naturally skeptical of simplistic slogans and solutions.

Back to the example, if you build more houses, then maybe people will just have more babies and fill them up anyhow. A biology expert may be more likely to apply population systems knowledge into such questions than somebody without such a background. If you give a tray of bacteria more food, initially each cell will have more to eat. But after a while they will multiply and the scarcity will return. Food would not continue to be "more affordable" (easier to obtain).

Some big cities found out that when they built more freeways, rather than reduce traffic congestion, they eventually just filled right back up and were just as jammed as before. People started choosing jobs and homes that took "advantage" of the new freeways and thus re-flooded them back to prior levels.

Second, what if the housing restrictions were on upper-crust housing? If there were limits on the building of expensive houses, then perhaps houses more affordable to the lower and middle class would be available, at least in that area. The question didn't say what kind of restriction was applied.

In summary, many of WSJ's questions don't have simple yes or no answers in practice. They are more points of discussion than questions. Society is not simple and anybody who sells simple answers, such as Murdoch's various "works", is usually full of it. (Some of the other quiz questions are addressed in my "Trade Myths" article.)

Boehner Bashes Beatle Because Bush Bypassed Books

"House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) is demanding that Paul McCartney apologize for expressing his gratitude that America again has a president "who knows what a library is." -
Huffington Post

Lack of Regulation Can Be Inefficient

I once had an all-in-one printer, fax, and scanner from a company I won't name. Let's just call the company Harlet Racket for now, or HR for short. This HR printer played every trick in the book to get me to buy ink cartridges that I didn't really need.

For example, if the color cartridge "expired", it wouldn't let me use the black-ink cartridge, which was a separate cartridge, even if I only wanted to print in black-and-white. (I explicitly selected back-and-white-only from the document print settings.) I had to buy a color cartridge just to print black-and-white.

And if I only wanted to scan an image into a computer file, any expired ink cartridge would trigger a series of ink warning messages. It could have been a simple message, but instead they made it a laborious finger dance. You don't need any ink to scan an image into computer memory, so why should I have to press a bunch of nag buttons to bypass ink warnings?

After a few years I ended up spending more on ink cartridges than I did on the all-in-one printer, and I only printed an average of about two-dozen pages a month. (Remember that equipment revenge scene from Office Space?) A search of consumer sites the web revealed that other brands pulled similar shenanigans.

This is a case where capitalism is failing to be efficient. I'm spending time and money on ink cartridges I don't need because Harlet Racket, Inc. is playing games with me. Ideally we'd want Harlet Racket, Inc. to spend its effort and resources on making printing easier and cheaper, not on tricking consumers to waste. However, the latter is quite common.

Landfills are full of gizmos that could have a longer practical life if they used standardized batteries, bulbs, and power adapters; but companies make more money if they use proprietary replacement parts. I could rant on and on about many other sleazy consumer tricks that make us waste time and money and turn prematurely gray. This is not a rational way of things.

Regulation can go a long ways in making our economy more efficient. A lot of it doesn't even have to be "hard" regulation, but merely product labels that would be required to state certain aspects of products that companies don't want consumers to know about, such as usage of proprietary power adapters. That's not dictating behavior, but rather merely informing consumers and investors of potential issues or limitations. It would encourage companies to do things right and make the USA economy more rational and efficient instead of The Land of Gimmicky.

The Sane Way to Prevent AZ Illegals

As a follow-up to my last entry, I'll clarify the proper way to check for illegal workers. When somebody applies for a job, by law they would go to a certified ID verification service, similar to a drug-testing lab (which is common for employment these days). The employer itself would not do the ID check. Any employer that does not have a worker go to a certified station before work (or within a given time-limit) would be given stiff penalties.

The employee's Social Security Number (SSN) would be used to check their name, residence, and any current work locations. If there is an overlap with somebody else's work or tax record, a different name or address, or it's a non-existent SSN, then further investigation is done and the hiring is delayed until the investigation is finished.

Thus, even the best fake ID would produce suspicious overlaps in the tax records. Either the number is invalid or will produce conflicting information against the valid tax-payer with the stolen SSN number. Sure, there are ways to get around this, but the cost of working around such checks for an illegal migrant worker is generally prohibitive relative to their expected earnings.

As far as under-the-table work, larger rewards could be given for tips leading to arrests, including possible credits toward citizenship.

The Most Interesting Frisk

Stay out of Arizona, my friends. Arizona could have chosen to reduce the illegal immigrant population of their state by requiring stronger employer screening and random audits by state authorities. Instead, they chose the Nazi-like approach (did I use the "N" word?) of stopping "suspicious" people on the street, which is essentially racial profiling. But that's okay, it's a dry hate.

Right-Wing, Nazis, and Emotional Gimmickry

The right wing are masters of jingoism and simplistic but emotional "political marketing". Their repeated use of the symbolism of Nazi Germany is a case in point.

Last summer I forced myself to listen to Rush Limbaugh again, perhaps as some form of political rubber-necking. He was complaining about the left's criticism of his associating the Obama administration with Hitler's Nazi party.

Here's a general paraphrase of Rush's statement:

"I didn't mean that Obama's administration was involved in killing of Jewish people and invading neighboring countries, but rather that their excessive government services, such as health-care, were like that of the Nazi's." [paraphrased]

Rush could have compared the healthcare proposal to several dozen other country's government services, many an equal or better fit, let alone more recent. Instead, he chooses to compare it to 1940's Germany. While it may be technically true that the Nazi government provided what the right may call "socialized medicine", to use them as the comparison subject instead of say modern day Norway, is obviously emotion-based symbolic manipulation.

Comparing to Norway or Canada won't pack the same emotionally-stirring punch as Nazi Germany. Although Rush's statement is not an outright lie, it's certainly an offensive and misleading comparison. It can almost be compared to the fallacy, "You have a mustache, and so did Hitler. Therefore, you are evil like Hitler." It's cheap political marketing that borders on "evil", if you will.

Glenn Beck has topped this kind of sick manipulation when he talked about Nazi's eugenics program and cried on Fox News because one of the Nazi eugenics poster subjects reminded him of his daughter, who has cerebral palsy.

His argument was basically that socialized healthcare leads to a slippery slope down into Nazi-like eugenics. But, almost the entire industrial world has socialized healthcare. Yet they are not turning into mad Nazi's. (Letting people die in the streets for the crime of "being poor" is arguable fairly close to that, however.) Glenn is using child-like "playground logic". Using his daughter's illness as a tool for such sick public manipulation is, however, more than just a play-ground prank.

I don't know whether such forced associations are due to ignorance, self-deception, drama addiction, or some other pathology; but it is disturbing and the right-wind media keep doing it in excess. There are many poorly-educated and willfully-ignorant people in America who are susceptible to poor logic delivered with powerful acting.

Fox News should fire the bastard if they had any real standards. But, unfortunately, they don't. Rupert Murdoch appears to believe that the ends justify the means. If he has to destroy the left using misleading manipulation and emotional gimmicks, he will.

And, I hope Glenn's daughter gets well enough to slap her stupid, drama-queen father.

Johny Come Lately Tea Partiers

The most common theme of the Tea Party protests is taxes; they are angry over the government's stimulus and bailout spending. However, there was very little public anger expressed by the same groups when Bush was spending like a drunken sailor during a time when we were not in a recession. At least the current spending is an attempt to get us out of a recession. It has a real purpose, regardless of whether you believe in stimulus plans or not. Bush's was merely sloth and political gimmicky. Remember that tax refund check you got from ol' Dubya when he was giving Clinton's surplus "back to the people"? I'm sure the Tea Party crowd happily spent that sucker. The word "hypocrite" comes to mind. And then there's Reagan's spending.

Profile This!

Right-wingers generally want to bring back profiling in order to stop the big bad terrorists. The same way we didn't need torture for every war since Washington's time, we now suddenly "need" it. With the likes of the Cessna anti-IRS terrorist and Tim McVeigh's posse still in existence; are the wingers still interested in profiling? If so, I'd suggest that each grumpy white Tea Party member get the best anal exam an airport security team has to offer.

Mass Disease?

The more verbal right-wingers like to quote Michael Savage (whose real name is Michael Weiner) who claims in a book that "liberalism is a mental disease". But the vast majority of the industrial world is progressive. Does this mean the vast majority of the world is mentally ill??? If you think 90% of the world is mentally ill but you are fine, Occam's Razor would suggest that YOU are the one missing some bolts instead.

Free Speech is for People, Not Things

The recent Supreme Court ruling giving corporations the right to bribe....I mean donate to political campaigns is very disappointing. The constitution starts out, "We the People...", not "We the corporations" or "We the robots". Big corporations already have enough influence over politics. People should control politics, not things. Next thing you know, that cyst on Rush Limbaugh's caboose will have the right to vote.

Bubbles, What If They Are Not Preventable?

Experts have proven time and time again unable to detect economic and financial bubbles until after they burst, at which point it's too late. It seems the "next bubble" is always different enough from prior bubbles that nobody is sure what it is.

Because of this, we need a financial version of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. As long as economic growth is positive, the fed should set aside some of the nation's money for the Strategic Monetary Reserve. This will allow a sufficient stimulus package the next time we get ourselves into a jam. And it will keep politicians' fingers out of the pot.

King James was "Liberal Media"?

I hope this is a hoax. If not, it is the ultimate in right-wing nutbaggativity. The Conservapedia Bible Project wants to change the parts of the Bible that they don't like.

Here's some quotes (taken as of 1/2/2009). My comments are marked with ">>>":

"The Conservative Bible Project is a project utilizing the "best of the public" to render God's word into modern English without liberal translation distortions."

"Liberal bias has become the single biggest distortion in modern Bible translations."

"But the third -- and largest -- source of translation error requires conservative principles to reduce and eliminate."

>>> Requires? I'm sure that's what the recipe stated.

"Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias"

"Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms to capture better the original intent;[5] Defective translations use the word "comrade" three times as often as "volunteer"; similarly, updating words that have a change in meaning, such as "word", "peace", and "miracle"."

>>> Re: "using powerful new conservative terms to capture...". Hire a marketing firm while you are at it. "It's the new improved Conservative Coke, bubblier and bible-ier than ever!"

"Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction[6] by using modern terms for it, such as "gamble" rather than "cast lots"..."

>>> What, you never casted lots in Vegas?

"Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning"

>>> Like, "My dear followers, your jobs will be outsourced to the Huns, who work 40% cheaper".

"Exclude Later-Inserted Inauthentic Passages: excluding the interpolated passages that liberals commonly put their own spin on, such as the adulteress story"

>>> The evidence for removal appears to be nothing more than "it doesn't fit the same style". So, if it's conservative-leaning and it doesn't fit the same style, then keep it. If its liberal and it doesn't fit the same style, then toss it. It would be fairer to cast lots.

"Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word "Lord" rather than "Jehovah" or "Yahweh" or "Lord God."

>>> Oh those talkative ancient liberals! It's all Greek to me. Literally. The strategery of making the pie higher hurts my belly.

"... identify faulty pro-liberal terms used in existing Bible translations, such as "government", and suggest more accurate substitutes..."

>>> Maybe the Romans collected "Texas" instead of "taxes". It's all just a Big Liberal Typo.

"... identify conservative terms that are omitted from existing translations, and propose where they could improve the translation..."

>>> Hmmm, I think I'll insert "waterboarding" right.....here!

"Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." Is this a corruption of the original, perhaps promoted by liberals without regard to its authenticity? This does not appear in any other Gospel, and the simple fact is that some of the persecutors of Jesus did know what they were doing. This quotation is a favorite of liberals, although it does not appear in the earliest and best manuscripts of the Gospel of Luke. It should not appear in a conservative Bible, because in point of fact Jesus might never had said it at all."

>>> There's a lot of stuff that comes and goes in the early manuscripts. This appears to be same biased filtering as described above under the adulteress item: keep the suspicious conservative passages but not the suspicious liberal passages.

"Socialistic terminology permeates English translations of the Bible, without justification. This improperly encourages the "social justice" movement among Christians. For example, the conservative word "volunteer" is mentioned only once in the ESV, yet the socialistic word "comrade" is used three times, "laborer(s)" is used 13 times, "labored" 15 times, and "fellow" (as in "fellow worker") is used 55 times."

>>> "Why, we are not slaves, but merely volunteers. We like the whipping, it kills our fleas." And, how is volunteerism part of the Adam Smith model? This whole statement is disturbing on many levels. What is this "justification" they speak of?

"...the ensuing debate would flesh out -- and stop -- the infiltration of churches by liberals pretending to be Christian, much as a vote by legislators exposes the liberals..."

>>> You guys miss Joe McCarthy, don't you? Maybe YOU guys are the "pretenders", Senator Craig-style.

"...this would debunk the pervasive and hurtful myth that Jesus would be a political liberal today..."

>>> Yeah, Jesus couldn't possibly be liberal. Therefore, the Bible must be WRONG. Logic! Let's just change it; make it in OUR image. We are the Creators now. Lets elect ourselves as profits.....oops I meant prophets, while we are at it. After all, the Mormons got away with it.