It was 94 today. My air conditioner is on. Global warming. When will we learn.

Well it looks like Chrysler is filing for bankruptcy, and GM isn’t far behind, despite the billions of dollars we taxpayers graciously bestowed upon them.

Chrysler is up against an April 30 deadline to submit a restructuring plan to the Treasury Department to qualify for more bailout money. The company has already received about $5 billion and is looking for more to keep assembly lines running.
If the company were to seek Chapter 11 protection, the Treasury would likely provide the day-to-day financing it needs to remain in operation, the Times reported. That would include covering commitments to the company’s unionized workers and retirees, giving Chrysler some financial leeway while it hammers out a restructuring plan with its creditors under the supervision of a federal bankruptcy-court judge.

Unfortunately, I think this is only the beginning.  Wait till the banks start falling apart, then things will get really interesting.

Worries about an economic collapse due to large banks failing are ridiculous. Where there is a demand for credit, there will be supply. Micro-lending in South-side Chicago proves it.

Approximately two dozen such people offered small loans to residents and local proprietors — anywhere from $25 to $5,000. The obvious advantage was that you didn’t need a solid credit history. Desperation and lack of financial services were the only requirements. The disadvantage lay in high interest rates (40 percent was not uncommon), but also in the associated penalties: contrary to popular perception, very few cases of failed payment led to physical harm. Instead, you could be forced to pay in kind — e.g., with a television set — or with food stamps and welfare checks (which also function as collateral).

Due to the high interest rates, some might call these people loan sharks, but they aren’t much worse than your average credit card. Plus, they are taking a bigger risk with people who have bad or no credit history.

When institutions fail, entrepreneurs make money.

It looks like Obama is doing right in free market ville. He is going to push through a free trade agreement with Colombia. Free trade is music to my ears.

It started Saturday, when he put himself next to Colombian President Alvaro Uribe at lunch and then studiously exchanged notes.

Having listened to Uribe, (and that must have been a nice dose of sanity after enduring 50 minutes of ravings from Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, or weird conspiracy theories by Bolivia’s Evo Morales), Obama then seemed to realize that the long-stalled Colombia free trade agreement should have been passed yesterday.

The president announced that his team must find a way to pass the agreement. With world trade down 80%, the pact opens new markets to the U.S. He demanded immediate action, asking Colombia’s trade minister to fly to Washington this week.

Then it got even better: Obama invited Uribe to the White House and promised to visit Colombia himself, allowing the Colombians to lay out for him their vast economic and social progress, and their desire to integrate into global trade.

It nice to see Obama support trade with other countries. I just wished he supported more free market principles.

Do unions and taxes increase unemployment?

Putting this together, 3 of the 6 states with the highest unemployment (California, Oregon, and Rhode Island) have both high marginal income tax rates and high union representation. Michigan has high unionization but moderate marginal income tax rates, and the Carolinas have high marginal income taxes, but low unionization rates.

Among the 6 states with the lowest jobless rates, 4 have low unionization rates and no state income tax or modest marginal rates and a fifth (Nebraska) has average income tax rates and low unionization. The exception is Iowa, which has average unionization rates (13%) and high marginal income taxes (8.98%).

And here I thought taxes only hurt the rich and union help the little people. I’m shocked. Just absolutely shocked that this might not be true.

Hey Citigroup, now that you’re profitable again, how about you start paying back that TARP money? That is assuming you’re not misrepresenting your earnings.

Wizbang notes:

Naturally liberals are branding the turnout of half a million Tea Party supporters on Wednesday as a “failure.” But so far, the nascent Tea Party movement has either matched or exceeded the turnouts reported for the first liberal “meet-ups” that were the precursors to the Netroots phenomenon of 2004 - 2008.

Of course those meetings garnered massive nationwide press coverage by a news media desperate to report anything that might damage the Bush Administration. The April 16 New York Times, by contrast, failed to publish a single word about the Tea Parties.

For all of its alleged “failure” this week, Fox News ratings soared during its Tea Party coverage, while over on the other side, the New York Times just announced that it will eliminate several weekly sections of its newspaper in order to cut millions of dollars in operating costs. No further comment should be necessary.

A post Over at Doug Ross @ Journal makes an excellent job of point out the discrepancy in coverage of political protest. He points to the massive amount of coverage Cindy Sheehan enjoyed when she and several other protesters went to the Crawford ranch to protest the war. Compare that over the top coverage with the yesterday reporting of the tea party protests. The coverage of the tea party protest was modest at best particularly at the national level. Why does a handful of protesters receive sustained saturated coverage for several days, while protesters close to a hundred thousand strong present in hundreds of cities receives only minor coverage.

I’m very interested in seeing how my readers more skeptical of MSM bias will explain this discrepancy.

Because good journalist isn’t afraid to put a politician’s feet to the fire.

I almost feel sorry for her. Almost.

I finished reading The Economic Laws of Scientific Research and one of the last thing Terrence talked about was education in the Britain during the 19th century. Apparently prior to the nationalization of education the vast majority of children were being educated through private means. This included the poor as they would pay a fee and the rest of the cost was subsidize by charity and the church. Thus we see that in a laissez-faire fair system the poor are educated without state intervention.

Interesting, British politicians argued for the nationalization of the education system when they saw other nations use the state to offer universal education. These politicians worried that these other nations would gain economic advantage over Brittan because of nationalized education. Ironically, its was the superiority of the private education system in Brittan that lead politicians in other countries to argue for nationalization of education in their own countries.

The most frustrating aspect of this though is that even after British politicians procured funding for state schools in England, they had difficulties filling the classrooms with students. The private schools were superior and poor families would gladly pay a fee to send their children to private schools. However taxes were eventually increased to finance the public schools making it to expensive for the poor to pay for private schools.

Thus Brittan, with superior schools that provided education to the poor, nationalized education, creating inferior schools, that it then forced the poor to use after it increased their taxes to subsidize it’s inferior schools.

Welcome to state intervention. It’s coercion guarantees the dominance of inferiority.