Author: CS Admin

Democracy on the Sly

Citizens for Responsible Government, CAVE, CAVES , Mayor Sly James , Dan Coffey, Kansas City, JGill, Paul Jacob, Common Sense, collage, photomontage

Mayor Sly James loves his city: Kansas City, Missouri.

He dreams of a shining new airport on a hill, a land of milk and honey with a new, luxurious, taxpayer-financed downtown hotel. He envisions it as a harmonious hub in which the thrill of … waiting for a richly subsidized streetcar is ubiquitous.

Yet, at every turn, a group of pesky citizens, Citizens for Responsible Government, has dashed the mayor’s dreams.

How?

A 2013 initiative petition drive blocked the $1.5 billion airport project.
Through a 2014 initiative effort, voters soundly defeated a streetcar expansion.
Weeks ago, this same rambunctious mob of retirees turned in enough signatures to force a public vote regarding the $311 million subsidy plan for a new downtown hotel.

“This is democracy at work,” claims Dan Coffey, serving as the group’s spokesperson.

For his part, the mayor offers, “I respect the people’s right to voice their opinion, but … I’m going to fight for this hotel deal.”

A man of principle!

Mayor Sly has taken to calling Coffey’s group CAVE — “Citizens Against Virtually Everything.” Coffey only notes that the mayor has left out a letter: the acronym should be CAVES — “Citizens Against Virtually Everything Stupid.”

“We started off a group of interested citizens that didn’t like the way things were going, particularly the way taxpayer money was being spent in Kansas City,” Coffey recently told the Kansas City Star. “Everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it.”

Coffey’s group has changed that dynamic … using direct democracy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags ballot initiative, democracy, government waste, Kansas City

Accountability national politics & policies responsibility

Assuming the Fix

caution, danger, debt, social security, collage, photomontage, illustration, JGill, Paul Jacob, Common Sense

Social Security, like similar systems in Europe, is on a trajectory to insolvency, which could lead to a sovereign debt crisis.

The reason for the crisis? Social Security has always been a pay-as-we-go system, dependent on many workers paying in to a system that sends their contributions to a smaller number of retirees. When the number of retirees expands above the ability of workers to cover at established rates, the system goes broke. Meanwhile, all the system’s budget overages from the beginning to the present date have not been saved and invested. Congress has been taking the overages and spending them, putting IOUs in a notebook.

It is a serious problem.

Or, it isn’t! That is, not if you believe The Nation, which states in a recent article that this is all the result of a legally mandated “bogus” accounting conceit. The Congressional Budget Office, you see,

assumes that Social Security and Medicare Part A will draw on the general fund of the US Treasury to cover benefit shortfalls following the depletion of their trust funds, which at the current rate will occur in 2034.
That would obviously lead to an exploding debt, but it’s a scenario prohibited by law.

The Nation’s somewhat confused author suggests the dire warnings are wrong because “Congress could preemptively pass laws to avert the situation before the deadline; it could take the approach favored by progressives and increase revenue to the programs by lifting the payroll tax cap, or alternatively raise the retirement age and lower benefits.”

Well, yes. But until a fix happens, the doomsday warning stands.

Why does he think we make the warning?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags debt, economics, Social Security, solvency, The Nation

folly national politics & policies

A Tunnel with No Light

Obama, quagmire, foreign policy, Afghanistan, Syria, war, collage, photomontage, JGill, Paul Jacob, Common Sense

President Barack Obama pledged we’d be out of Afghanistan by 2016, but yesterday announced a “modest but meaningful extension of our presence” — keeping the 10,000 troops currently stationed there for all of 2016, and then, in perpetuity, maintaining a force five times larger than previously planned.

Why? Because, after 14 years of conflict and nation-building, Afghanistan is still neck-deep in violence. Last month, the Taliban briefly captured Kunduz, a city of over 250,000 people. Going forward, Obama admitted, “There will continue to be contested areas.”

The Afghan government is not self-sustainable and nobody seems to know how many years or decades or centuries that might take to achieve.

Meanwhile, over in Syria, the U.S. cannot train more than four or five moderate soldiers after much bluster and promise — and splurging a cool $500 million.

The U.S. invaded and “regime-changed” Iraq, helping shape a new government and national army. With all that effort — a cost of thousands of lives — once our soldiers weren’t doing the daily fighting to tamp down the bloody sectarian chasm, ISIS formed, the Iraqi army ran away and the country soon collapsed into civil war.

The Iraq Conquest put southern Iraq into Iranian orbit. How many lives was that worth?

The problem? Not military incompetence. The mission is the problem. Has any politician or military leader plausibly put forth a plan whereby our country’s intervention actually creates an improved and sustainable political order in any of these nations?

If so, let’s see it.

If not, why are our soldiers still in harm’s way?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Afghanistan, foreign policy, Iraq, Obama, quagmire, Syria, war

folly ideological culture meme nannyism national politics & policies political challengers too much government

All Those Egos, One Basket

Post author By CS Admin
Post date October 15, 2015
3 Comments on All Those Egos, One Basket

progressivism, meme, progressives, magic, Paul Jacob

In Tuesday night’s debate, Democrats put all their egos in one ideological basket: progressivism. Even Jim Webb managed to sound progressive … until he identified his prime personal enemy — the man he shot in wartime.

Bernie Sanders once again insisted on lecturing Americans on what it means to be a “democratic socialist.” Martin O’Malley relentlessly pursued an impossible dream, 100 percent carbon-free electric production by 2050 — far enough off to avoid any possible accountability. And Hillary Clinton said that, sure, she’s a progressive, “a progressive who likes to get things done!”

But what has she “got done,” ever?

It was her secrecy regarding the initial health care reforms back in her husband’s first term that helped spark the firestorm of opposition that led to the Revolution of ’94, and to the triangulating successes of the master of manipulative compromise, Bill Clinton. His was not a “progressive era,” though Democrats still use the 1990s as proof that their (“our”) policies “work.”

With exception of Bernie on gun control and Hillary on foreign policy and spying (Snowden gave out secrets to the enemy: traitor; she gave out who-knows-what via her insecure email server: blankout), the spend-spend-spend mantra of progressivism, mixed with “fair taxes” (higher tax rates) on the top 1 percent, was not challenged on the stage.

How far would they go to close ranks? Bernie sided with her regarding “your damned e‑mails.” That’s so ideological as to eschew any consideration of character or loyalty or trust.

Quite a revolution … in the party.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags 2016 Presidential race, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Presidential campaign 2016, progressives, progressivism

meme

Hillary’s Accomplishments

Post author By CS Admin
Post date October 15, 2015
No Comments on Hillary’s Accomplishments

“I’m a progressive who likes to get things done.”

—Hillary Clinton

Click the image below for a high resolution version:

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Plotting Progress

Angus Deaton, Nobel Prize, Economics, The Great Escape, Inequality, collage, photomontage, JGill, Paul Jacob, Common Sense

The prestige of the Nobel Peace Prize has been tarnished by some more-than-dubious awards, in our time … Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama, most obviously.

Same goes for the Bank of Sweden’s knock-off “Memorial” prize for economics.

But, according to David R. Henderson, this week’s Nobel nod to Scottish-born Angus Deaton, for his “analysis of consumption, poverty and welfare,” is “a fine pick.”

Deaton is, writes Henderson, “an important chronicler of the market’s abilities to create wealth and improve society.”

While it is all the rage, these days, to complain about increasing inequality, Deaton has been instrumental in showing that wealth, health and welfare have increased as poverty, worldwide, has decreased.

And this has been largely the result of markets. Not big government programs.

Deaton, Henderson tells us, “believes that the approximately $5 trillion given by governments of rich countries to poor countries over the past 50 years has undercut good governance by making poor countries’ leaders less accountable to their own citizens.”

ABC News seconds Henderson’s account:

In his 2013 book, The Great Escape, Deaton expressed skepticism about the effectiveness of international aid programs in addressing poverty.… China and India have lifted tens of millions of people out of poverty despite receiving relatively little aid money. Yet at the same time, poverty has remained entrenched in many African countries that have received substantial sums.

Peter G. Klein, at mises.org, identifies a deeper insight by the latest Nobel economist: “aggregate measures of consumption and inequality conceal important differences among individuals.” This explains why Deaton came to his other (controversial) conclusions: he never took his eye off the real player in market life, the individual.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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