“The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.” –Thomas Jefferson

Employers added 88,000 jobs in March, according to the latest unemployment report from the Labor Department. That’s down from the 196,000/month average over the last six months. Yet miraculously, the headline unemployment rate dropped from 7.7 percent to 7.6 percent. As with previous drops, however, that’s because a staggering 663,000 people simply left the workforce in March and gave up looking for a job. A record 90 million Americans are no longer even seeking employment.

Since the “surprise” drop in unemployment the month before Obama was narrowly re-elected last year, he has focused only on the unemployment number. However, given that his agenda is now to raise even more taxes and further expand government programs and regulations, Obama will insist that even though that number ticked down, it would have been substantially lower if not for the Republican Sequester.

His apologists – namely economic adviser Austan Goolsbee and the Associated Press – wasted little time in advancing this line of blame. Goolsbee said, “Now you’re going to, interestingly, start seeing a lot of discussion about maybe the sequester’s a bigger deal than people thought it was.” The AP argued, “The weakness may signal that companies were worried last month about steep government spending cuts that began on March 1.”

Obama certainly won’t focus on the fact that the lower unemployment numbers mask the more important number that reflects his failed economic policies. The most significant economic news in March is, again, the record number of Americans who are no longer looking for work, and that number has gone up every month in the last two years. The labor participation rate has dropped again, from 63.5 percent to 63.3 percent – the worst since the height of the Carter malaise in 1979.

Some other numbers: The U-6 unemployment rate (a broader measure) fell from 14.3 percent to 13.8 percent, the lowest since before Obama took office. But, if labor participation was the same as in March just one year ago, the headline unemployment rate would be 8.3 percent. If it remained the same as in January 2009, the rate would be 10.9 percent.

Finally, the Obama budget is due to be released next Wednesday. Look for him to use these disappointing jobs numbers as leverage to call for more government “stimulus.”

Government and Politics

Second Amendment: Bills and Treaties

“It shall be unlawful for any person who lawfully possesses or owns a firearm that has been shipped or transported in, or has been possessed in or affecting, interstate or foreign commerce, to fail to report the theft or loss of the firearm, within 24 hours after the person discovers the theft or loss, to the Attorney General and to the appropriate local authorities.” So reads Section 123 of the Senate’s gun control bill (S. 649). In plain English, that means anyone who fails to report a missing firearm to the local police and the U.S. attorney general within 24 hours becomes a felon and faces five years in prison. This is an outrageous and unreasonable requirement, and should doom the bill to failure. And that’s not to mention other provisions such as prohibiting leaving your firearm at home for more than seven days with someone who isn’t the owner.

Meanwhile, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) is pushing the Firearm Risk Protection Act, which would require that gun owners purchase liability insurance or pay a $10,000 fine. “For too long, gun victims and society at large have borne the brunt of the costs of gun violence,” Maloney said in a written statement. “My bill would change that by shifting some of that cost back onto those who own the weapons.” We’re going out on a limb by guessing that criminals won’t be deterred by such a requirement, but fortunately the bill is unlikely to go anywhere.

In the states, the Constitution State became the latest one to trample its namesake document. Democrat Gov. Dannel Malloy signed legislation adding more than 100 firearms to its ban on semiautomatic rifles. It also bans standard-capacity magazines holding more than 10 rounds and creates eligibility rules for purchasing ammunition.

The good news, reports The Wall Street Journal, is that since December “states have passed more measures expanding rather than restricting the right to carry firearms.”

Finally, the UN passed its Arms Trade Treaty with U.S. support. The Obama administration waited until it had post-election “flexibility” to announce that it would no longer demand passage by “consensus,” which helped propel the treaty through. The treaty could subject, at least in part, U.S. sovereignty and Second Amendment rights to a corrupt world body full of anti-American despots and tyrants. The only good news is that the treaty has almost no chance of passing the Senate, where it needs a two-thirds majority for ratification but could fail to garner even a majority.

Today’s BIG Lie Award Winner

“[Colorado] treasures its Second Amendment rights – a state of proud hunters and sportsmen. … Surely we can have a debate … to do something to stop the epidemic of gun violence. There’s no reason we can’t do this unless politics is getting in the way.” –Barack Obama, repeating his mendacious mantra that the Second Amendment is about “hunters and sportsmen”

Besides, the epidemic is not “gun violence” but “violence” – almost all of it is the direct result of socialist polices creating urban poverty plantations where gangs thrive. Oddly, Democrats have yet to campaign against gang violence. The only “politics getting in the way” is Obama’s political agenda, which has nothing to do with reducing violence and everything to do with reducing the capacity of the people to defend Liberty.

“The opponents of some of these common-sense laws have ginned up fears among responsible gun owners that have nothing to do with what’s being proposed, nothing to do with the facts, but feeds [sic] into this suspicion about government. You hear some of these quotes: ‘I need a gun to protect myself from the government.’ ‘We can’t do background checks because the government’s gonna come take my guns away.’ The government’s us. These officials are elected by you. They are elected by you, I am elected by you. I am constrained as they are constrained by a system that our founders put in place. This is a government of and by and for the people.” –Obama

For the record, if Obama was truly “constrained by a system that our founders put in place,” we would not be having this debate.

“[I]t is possible for us to create common-sense gun safety measures that respect the traditions of gun ownership in this country and hunters and sportsmen, but also make sure that we don’t have another 20 children in a classroom gunned down by a semiautomatic weapon – by a fully automatic weapon in that case, sadly.” –Obama, continuing to deliberately confuse the issue of semi-auto and fully automatic weapons

Furthermore, Obama often makes his pitches not just on the caskets of children, but backed by uniformed police officers – as if these police departments support his anti-constitutional agenda. By now, we know that nothing is beneath this president, including the shameless use of children, the military and law enforcement officers as “human shields” for furthering his agenda. It’s inexcusable, and we’re glad to see some of Denver’s finest balking at the practice.

This Week’s ‘Braying Jenny’ Award

“The good news for you, you live in Denver. The Denver PD would be there within minutes. (laughing) You’d probably be dead anyway.” –Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO) mocking a senior citizen concerned about defending himself

That’s right – when seconds count, the police are just minutes away.

See the video.

Today’s Non Compos Mentis Award Winner

“I will tell you these are ammunition, they’re bullets, so the people who have those now – they’re going to shoot them, and so if you ban them in the future, the number of these high-capacity magazines is going to decrease dramatically over time because the bullets will have been shot and there won’t be any more available.” –Diana DeGette, primary sponsor of House legislation to ban standard-capacity magazines, responding to a question about what they are. DeGette apparently thought that magazines are single-use items, and once empty, disposed.

See the video.

And a bonus NCM Award goes to her spokesperson, Juliet Johnson, who issued this clarification: “The congresswoman has been working on a high-capacity assault magazine ban for years and has been deeply involved in the issue; she simply misspoke in referring to ‘magazines’ when she should have referred to ‘clips,’ which cannot be reused.” Actually, most clips are also reusable, and the proposed legislation refers to magazines, not clips – they are two different things.

News From the Swamp: Senate Budget and Tax Measurements

The Senate passed a budget during the early morning hours last weekend by a 50-49 vote. It’s the first budget the chamber has passed in four years, and it clearly demonstrates that the party in charge hasn’t learned a thing about economics in that time. The $3.7 trillion package makes no effort to address the debt. In fact, it even adds to the nation’s fiscal troubles by tacking on $100 billion in “stimulus” spending and (at least) another $1 trillion in taxes. It didn’t earn one Republican vote, and even four Democrats, including Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, voted against it. More would have joined them, but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) needed every vote he could get. In the end, only those in the most politically vulnerable states were allowed to vote “no.”

One good thing that came out of the Senate budget debate was support for a non-binding resolution to use dynamic scoring for tax bills. Tax proposals going back many years have relied on what is known as static scoring – a process by which the Congressional Budget Office completely ignores the economic effect of tax policy. Static scoring inevitably leads to the conclusion that higher taxes draw more revenue while lower taxes hurt the economy. Dynamic scoring provides a more realistic, though not perfect, view of tax impact. Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) pushed the change, supported by all Senate Republicans and a small group of Democrats. It would be nice if the House picked up this plan and it became the standard going forward. Unfortunately, good ideas in Washington usually have a short shelf life.

Hope ‘n’ Change: Problems Mount for ObamaCare

Changes to ObamaCare continue to roll out as the complex and ultimately unworkable aspects of the law become evident. Among the latest updates just released, the administration announced that it will reduce insurance options for small businesses. Small business insurance coverage was one of the big selling points of the original bill, but now that ObamaCare is law, support from business owners isn’t as important. Businesses will now be able to offer only one insurance plan for all workers instead of a variety of plans. Furthermore, that one plan will be available only to businesses operating in one of the 33 states where the federal government will manage health exchanges. Small businesses in other states will have to wait for an unspecified time before offering to their employees plans that comport with the law.

Meanwhile, Health and Human Services reversed itself yet again on whether sex-change operations would be funded by Medicare and Medicaid. HHS first said it would allow such experimental surgeries to be covered, then announced they would not be covered. Then, likely due to the outcry of far-left groups, the department announced on its website that it would be considering proposals for covering sex change operations. Once news outlets picked up the story, HHS removed the announcement from its website and said it wouldn’t consider insurance coverage for sex-change operations after all. The department is likely just waiting for a time when no one’s looking to implement what it had planned all along.

HHS also publicly reversed itself regarding insurance subsidies for seniors enrolled in Medicare Advantage, the program that allows seniors to pursue private sector coverage options. HHS originally planned to cut subsidies by as much as 7.8 percent, but it will now cut those subsidies by only 4.7 - 5.6 percent. The Obama administration has been openly hostile to Medicare Advantage from the start precisely because of the flexibility the private sector offers. Indeed, ObamaCare contains provisions targeted for the program’s destruction. Along the way, though, the program’s popularity became evident, and the cuts caused an uproar. HHS claimed that because the cuts were written into the law, it was powerless to change them. Then numerous congressional Democrats concerned about their re-election prospects beseeched HHS to fix the cuts. The department made the adjustment without giving any indication as to why it could take on this power now but not before. By preventing steeper cuts to Medicare Advantage now, they can appear as heroes, while behind the scenes they will slowly squeeze the program out of existence only to then blame private insurance companies for raising rates thus making the program ineffective and obsolete.

Cyprus Bailout Update

Cyprus knuckled under to the EU-IMF bailout plan this week, and the terms will be painful for big savers. Cyprus had to come up with €5.8 billion to receive a €10 billion bailout. Much of that money was raised by raiding the country’s savings accounts. The bailout will target Cypriot accounts worth over €100,000 and dice them up as follows: 37.5 percent will become shares in the respective bank in which the account is held, 22.5 percent will be held in a non-interest-bearing account that can be further tapped for government seizure, and 40 percent will be placed in interest-bearing accounts but only made available if the bank performs well. Most banks have reopened, but even with controls in place, there’s no guarantee that capital flight won’t take place at the first opportunity. Other countries across Europe potentially in line for a similar haircut could also see their pool of cash dwindle as a result of this unprecedented power grab by central EU authorities.

Economy

Regulatory Commissars: EPA’s New Gas Regulations

Oil companies are bracing for new nationwide EPA gasoline regulations, slated to begin in 2017, which will supposedly reduce the amount of sulfur we breathe – but at a cost of billions of dollars to consumers. Dueling estimates by the government and oil companies claim varying costs. At the low end, the EPA believes consumers will pay an additional penny per gallon while the oil companies say it will be 6- to 9-cents per gallon. But given that the new standards would mirror those already in place in California – where gasoline prices average among the highest in the nation – it’s likely that consumers will be gouged at the maximum rate.

Moreover, the EPA says its proposals to tighten emission standards for cars to meet current California standards could add $130 to the per-vehicle cost. We’ll wager that’s a deliberate lowball estimate.

Overall the agency’s rose-colored glasses prediction is that health benefits to consumers, such as fewer days lost off work and a decreased number of asthma-related emergency room visits, will outweigh costs by 7-to-1. But just as the unintended consequences of higher CAFE standards led to cars that are far less safe, the “benefits” of these regulations are far more difficult to ascertain and quantify than the costs are. Besides, when health care is “free,” who needs to worry about fewer emergency room visits?

California’s Pipe Dream of Promises Goes Bust

Once upon a time, the land of milk and honey we call California was truly golden. Millions poured in from elsewhere, confident that a state with such natural bounties could provide for them. Politicians joined in the parade of optimism by promising state and municipal workers lavish retirement packages, figuring the economic gravy train would steam along unceasingly toward the fulfillment of these pledges.

Sadly, the Golden State Express has ground to a halt. Many businesses and industries have left California for less expensive locales, taking much of the revenue-producing private sector with it. Last week, what was left of investment potential in the state took another blow when a judge allowed the city of Stockton (population 300,000) to declare bankruptcy. Reluctant to take on the state’s public sector union and deal with an unfunded pension liability of $147 million, Stockton is instead trying to reduce its promised payout to bondholders by over 80 percent. It’s a trend that could continue statewide as California reportedly has a net worth of negative $127 billion – not even counting its pension and retiree health care obligations.

Meanwhile, California is doing its best to drive out yet more industry by hitching its wagon to the renewable energy religion. A state mandate that requires using 33 percent renewable energy by 2020 means that more natural gas “peak plants” need to be built in order to minimize supply interruptions. Failure to do so could lead to (more) rolling blackouts, warned California’s Independent System Operator. But due to industry’s flight and a lack of reliable electrical service, California’s financial situation will quickly spiral downward, meaning bondholders best beware.

Around the Nation: Freedom in the States

Call it the Land of the Free and the, uh, Less Free. A study released by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University ranked personal liberty among the 50 states, and while all men are created equal, it seems not all states are. The study looked at fiscal and regulatory policies as well as personal freedom. Not surprisingly, New York – the land of Bloomberg, highest-in-the-nation taxes, and rampant regulations – came in dead last. Ranking 49th was California, where the total tax burden is 10.8 percent, gun-owners face some of the worst restrictions in the nation and state debt stands at 25.8 percent of income. New Jersey came in 48th, thanks largely to endangered property rights but also owing to stringent gun control laws and a debt that tops 22.1 percent of income. On the flip side, the top three for freedom were North and South Dakota and our home state of Tennessee.

Of course, to some, freedom is in the eye of the beholder, and one New York resident called the infringements “a small pinprick, not enough to make me feel I’m not free in the great state of New York.” Others disagree, and according to the study, 9 percent of New York’s net population left the state between 2000 and 2011, marking the largest such exodus in the nation. Coincidence? We think not.

Security

Warfront With Crazy, a.k.a. North Korea

The ongoing 60-year war with North Korea, alternately hot or cold, took a decided swing toward hot recently. Kim Jong-un, the nation’s pudgy, baby-faced dictator, clearly learned from his father and grandfather how to stir the pot. Following an underground nuclear test in February, Kim employed one provocation after another against South Korea, the United States, Japan, and pretty much everybody else except China. Pyongyang unilaterally revoked the 1953 armistice with South Korea; threatened explicitly to attack the United States homeland (including Austin, Texas, of all places. Don’t mess with Texas!); released a Soviet-style propaganda video depicting a ground war against South Korean and U.S. forces; increased its military exercise tempo; announced suspension of South Korean access to a joint industrial zone that employs workers from both nations; and openly announced it will endeavor to improve its “nuclear armed forces” in quantity and quality.

The U.S. reaction has been a measured but firm effort to support South Korea and Japan, the two allies most directly threatened by the North’s provocations. In addition to holding the annual U.S.-South Korean military exercise Foal Eagle, the White House announced it would position Navy missile defense ships in the Sea of Japan and flew B-2 stealth bomber missions round-trip from Missouri to Korea and back. In one of the great ironies in recent memory, the White House also announced it will increase the number of ground-based missile defense interceptors along the West Coast from 30 to 45 – but only by the year 2017! It will also send a missile-defense system to Guam. So the same administration that did everything possible to kill missile defense back in 2009 now apparently sees the wisdom behind protection and wants more of it. Somewhere, the visionaries of missile defense, Ronald Reagan and Bill Van Cleave, are smiling.

The potential for miscalculation between North Korea and its neighbors should not be dismissed. North Korea has also sunk a South Korean warship, fired missiles over Japan, intercepted and threatened U.S. reconnaissance aircraft in international airspace, assaulted and killed U.S. soldiers working inside the DMZ fence, sent infiltrators by midget submarine into South Korea, and since 1953 conducted other provocations too numerous to list, including two underground nuclear tests. As always, the key factor in efforts to deal with troublemakers like North Korea is U.S. military capability and firmness in standing with our allies. The White House took encouraging early steps to meet these latest provocations. However, they decided that publicizing it all ratcheted up tensions too much, so they then backed off quickly.

Department of Military Correctness: No Purple Hearts for Ft. Hood Victims

The steady drip, drip, drip of the acid of political correctness continues to eat away at the very foundations of American civic and military culture. Three years ago at Fort Hood, U.S. Army Major Nidal Hasan, a self-proclaimed “Soldier of Allah,” shouted “Allahu Akbar” as he opened fire on dozens of his fellow soldiers and U.S. citizens. Fourteen people, including a baby in the womb, were killed, and over twice that many were wounded. In earlier centuries, this murdering jihadi would have been dispatched to his waiting virgins within days, if not hours, of this atrocity. But more than three years later, Hasan is still awaiting his court martial while the Obama regime makes a politically correct mockery of justice.

Obama started the PC parade by calling this act of jihad an incident of “workplace violence,” rather than the terrorist attack it clearly was. Indeed, both the FBI and a congressional investigation labeled it correctly. But not wanting to offend Muslims or admit that Islamist terrorists live in our midst, Obama disgracefully adhered to the phony workplace violence label, in spite of the negative consequences it has caused for survivors of the attack.

For example, Staff Sergeant Shawn Manning, shot six times by Hasan, was denied $70,000 in benefits that a soldier wounded in battle or by an act of terror would have qualified for. And now, Hasan’s victims are being denied the Purple Heart because the Pentagon, no doubt at the urging of the White House, says that awarding the medals would compromise Hasan’s chance for a fair trial. More likely, though, this move is an attempt to save the Obama regime from having to admit the true nature of the attack, as well as trying to head off legislation that would designate Hasan’s attack an act of terror and authorize survivors to receive the full benefits and Purple Hearts they deserve. A very PC position paper from the Army says that awarding medals to the dead and wounded would “set the stage for a formal declaration that Major Hasan is a terrorist.” To put it colloquially: Duh! Hasan IS a terrorist. But such is the degraded mental state that political correctness has brought to parts of the U.S. military and government.

Culture

Roe v. Gay

Thanks to the Left’s agenda to destroy American society, the Supreme Court of the U.S. (SCOTUS) entertained oral arguments for what will likely be a landmark decision in two cases encompassing the “gay marriage” issue. Setting aside the facts that the term itself is an oxymoron, that the Constitution is completely silent on the issue of marriage, and that no “right” to same-sex marriage is evidenced either by human history or by “natural law,” this is a relevant, timely issue to debate. The truth is that the debate should be taking place in state legislatures, not within the highest court in the land. Set aside also the obvious parallels to previous SCOTUS meddling – we refer of course to Roe v. Wade and similar forays through the jungles of judicial activism. Instead, let’s simply review the current issues.

First, Hollingsworth v. Perry is the appeal of the Ninth Circus’s predictable decision to strike down California’s popularly passed referendum, Proposition 8 (“Prop 8”), which changed California’s constitution to include the definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman. The Circus ruled, however, that the provision violates the Equal Protection clause under the U.S. Constitution. Of course, far be it from our mere-mortal staff to point out that the fundamental premise of that clause is that “like cases should be treated alike” and that to apply the clause to Prop 8 is to presuppose – as matter of law – that same-sex marriages are “like” traditional marriages. In other words, the Ninth implicitly rewrites millennia of established law to say that traditional marriages are not sufficiently distinct from “others” to justify unique treatment. That is, the Ninth Clown Act is once again attempting to legislate from the bench a matter that should have been reserved to the states in the first place.

To her credit, leftist Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked a rather salient question regarding attempts to redefine marriage: “If you say that marriage is a fundamental right, what state restrictions could ever exist?” That is, if same-sex marriage is a fundamental right – implying that the traditional definition of one man, one woman no longer applies – how could there be any limit to the definition in any way after that barrier has fallen?

Finally, U.S. v. Windsor is a challenge to the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), a statute passed overwhelmingly by Congress to prevent a particularly radical supreme court of one state – Hawaii – from forcing other states to recognize under the Constitution’s “Full Faith and Credit” clause same-sex marriage licenses granted by that state. Normally, a state, through its own statutes, could simply refuse to recognize another state’s marriage law. But an activist SCOTUS struck down Colorado’s attempt to do just that in Romer v. Evans (1995). Oddly enough, rather than being an intrusion on states’ rights – as some of our libertarian friends accuse – DOMA is actually an attempt by Congress to defend those rights by barring one state from imposing same-sex marriage on all the others.

We hope, of course, that the Supreme Court is not so fraught with “emanations-formed-by-penumbras” radicalism from its past to set the perfectly wrong precedent – as it did in Roe – or to disregard the definition of marriage established with Adam and Eve. But given the Left’s incessant march toward social disintegration – “The only value is that there are no values” – the unwillingness of would-be conservative torchbearers to make a principled, unified stand on the fundamental fabric of civilization – marriage – and the Court’s recent inability to do anything but make a chocolate mess out of critical constitutional issues (ObamaCare, anyone?), we certainly have our doubts.

The bottom line is that if marriage falls nationwide, the nation will, too. Marriage is the fabric, the very structure, of a society. From it, children and families best learn the ABCs of social order, right conduct and moral values. Without it, we have none of that. Instead, we will have chaos and entropy, and fertile ground for a despotic government to step in to assume the role of The Great Parent.

Village Academic Curriculum: Atlanta Cheating Scandal

On Tuesday, 35 criminals were ordered to surrender themselves to Atlanta police. Were they gang members? Of a sort. Were they thieves? Absolutely. They were public school teachers who used their excellent organizational skills and unique take on “performance bonuses” to form the largest cheating ring in U.S. history.

The teachers allegedly made a practice of rigging standardized tests to make it appear that students were performing better than they actually were. Some even allegedly hosted get-togethers where everyone grabbed a stack of tests and changed incorrect answers while they munched on pizza. For a while it worked. In one school, the percentage of eighth graders who scored “proficient” in math shot up from an abysmal 24 percent one year to 86 percent the next. Some students officially excelled in school while in reality they were reading far below grade level.

The defendants were charged with four crimes, including theft and influencing witnesses. Essentially, they’re charged with racketeering, for which they could each face a maximum of 20 years in prison. Sadly, however, these teachers are just the tip of the iceberg: An estimated 200 educators were involved in what authorities are calling an “orchestrated culture of cheating to benefit those at the top.” And benefit they did. Former Atlanta superintendent Beverly Hall raked in $500,000 in performance bonuses, not to mention national kudos for her “achievements” on behalf of Atlanta’s youth. Yet Hall seems more like the ringleader of a crime syndicate than an educator. She even twisted the arms of principals and teachers to go along with the scheme and punished those who refused.

The real crime here is not the stolen money, but the harm they’ve done to the children. The time they spent defrauding the system could have been used to actually teach skills necessary for educational and professional success.

Climate Change This Week: It Just Ain’t That Hot

It’s no secret that earth’s rising temperatures have come to a screeching halt, and we’ve documented why that’s likely the case. But environmentalists are increasingly forced to concede this inconvenient truth and are scrambling to deliver a convenient explanation. And, quite simply, their response is nothing short of predictable.

Consistent with how progressives “evolve,” some blame a still-emerging understanding of how the earth responds to rising greenhouse gases. “The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010,” The Economist notes. “That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. … [I]t may be that the climate is responding to higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in ways that had not been properly understood before.” This logic is equivalent to blaming more and less frequent snowstorms on global warming or blaming Antarctica’s expanding ice sheet on … ice melt. But in fact, current temperatures are on the low end of climate model projections. We suppose that’s the result of previously unknown variables, as well.

This would all be laughable if it weren’t so pathetic. While ecofascists thrash about to provide other possible explanations, the bottom line is this: For the Left, it doesn’t matter that the result is entirely contrary to their hot air. The answer must always be tied to global warming, despite the disconnect with CO₂. No wonder they now refer to “global warming” as “climate change.”

And Last…

On Monday, April 1, Barack Obama proclaimed April the month to teach young people “how to budget responsibly.”

April Fools!

“I call upon all Americans,” the president said with a straight face, “to observe this month with programs and activities to improve their understanding of financial principles and practices.” Coming from a guy who’s already saddled our children with an additional $6,000,000,000,000 in debt, this has to be an April Fools’ joke, right?

But to prove he’s serious about fiscal responsibility, Obama pledged to return 5 percent of his salary to the Treasury as a show of solidarity with federal workers facing sequester-caused furloughs. His offer comes to $20,000 this year (of his presidential pay check, not his overall $789,000 income in 2011), but we’re not sure it will make much of a dent in federal spending. It works out to about 2 percent of what the government is spending to study snail sex, and 1 percent of the cost of its study to learn “what animals really think.”

Oh well. Obama may have flunked economics, but at least he can shoot hoops.

Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
Nate Jackson for The Patriot Post Editorial Team