Author: CS Admin

C Is For Curmudgeon

Every writer can count among his loyal readers at least one curmudgeon. I have several. Today we consider the criticism of one special curmudgeon.

Let’s call him “Mr. C.”

Mr. C. agrees with my last several invokings of Common Sense. But he wonders, “Sure the [insert expletive here] of Republican presidential candidates are annoying, but never forget: the best Democratic candidate is worse than the worst Republican candidate.”

Mr. C. doesn’t mind ridiculing Trump, or questioning the savvy of Santorum. But, he tells me, “the very existence of a self-professed ‘socialist’ on the Democratic side suggests just how bad things have gotten.”

I don’t disagree. But should I agree with Mr. C. when he insists that “to call oneself a ‘socialist’ at this point in time is worse than calling oneself a ‘Ku Kluxer’”?

Further, Mr. C. informs me, it’s not just the candidate whose initials are “B.S.” who says outrageously commie, er, socialistic things.

“Hillary C.,” he insists, “trumps both Elizabeth Warren [who isn’t running] and B.S. with a whole wheelbarrow load of b.s. She just came out for ‘encouraging’ profit sharing by a business with its workers.”

What could be wrong with that?

Mr. C. has an answer: “All sorts of businesses engage in employee profit-sharing, aiming to encourage the proverbial ‘skin in the game.’ But forcing this is bad for many reasons.”

Again I agree. Mrs. Clinton’s proposal is just a sneaky way to play Robin Hood, without addressing the real issue behind all other issues, a lagging, red-tape bound economy.

Or, as was told to another Mr. C. years ago, “It’s the Economy, Stupid.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Printable PDF

Tags 2016 Presidential race, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, Presidential campaign 2016

government transparency initiative, referendum, and recall

Temporal Redistricting

They must be proud of themselves, the Little Rock insiders who pushed through a vote on a bond measure in hot-as-Hades mid-July.

Less than 4 percent of eligible voters turned out for the off-cycle exercise in 100-degree democracy. The measure, which refinances previous library bonds and puts an influx of cash into Little Rock public library branches, passed with over four-fifths of the minuscule turnout.

Now, as bond measures go, this one sure seems like a dream; its advocates say it will reduce, not increase, taxes.

But that July 14 vote!

“There was no organized opposition to the bond refinancing campaign,” we read, courtesy of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. “Still, Pulaski County Election Commission Executive Director Bryan Poe expected a higher voter turnout.” He thought they would get at least 6,000 voters. Still, even that many votes would have amounted to less than 5 percent of the over 126,000 registered city voters.

It certainly wasn’t any surprise, then, that turnout would be tiny and democratic decision-making left to a tiny fraction of the public.

Detect a certain odor?

It stinks of redistricting. When politicians redistrict voters so that predictable partisan outcomes can be reached — somehow to the benefit of those doing the redistricting — the insiders are not really trying to provide representation to voters. They are trying to continue their business as usual.

“Insiders know best”?

By selecting a summer date for the vote, insiders in effect redistrict the voters using time as the gerrymandering boundary. Call it temporal redistricting, advantaging those with the most at stake in the vote’s outcome.

Call it democracy for the 1 (or 3½) percent.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Printable PDF

Tags cheating, democracy, elections, gerrymandering, redistricting, vote, voters, voting

Accountability folly national politics & policies responsibility

Failing in the Future Biz

future, predicting the future, political, politics, collage, photomontage, illustration, prophecy, fortune teller, mistake

If you can’t sell us the future, you’re doing it wrong. We all want to get there in one piece.

Right now, a horde of Republican presidential candidates and a small cohort of Democrats vie to present themselves as visionaries, leaders.

Yet, what they all have in common is that they ignore the most serious issue facing us. Bigger than borders and terror and ISIS and gay marriage and all that, is the financial stability of the United States. Our future is in peril because of the continual Washington stalemate of never-ending deficit spending and continual debt growth — total debt being around $100 trillion.

The reason for this enormity? Politicians like to promise things, lots of things, very expensive things like wars and entitlements, to win our votes. But these same promiscuous over-promisers have more than a little difficulty agreeing on the taxes that would pay for all those “things.”

Why the difficulty? Because Americans already pay plenty in taxes and very few of us non-Omaha-based non-billionaires care to fork over even more of our hard-earned pay to a wasteful leviathan.

Any respectable vision of the future must acknowledge the current predicament, and provide a way out — before it’s too late, like it may very well already be … for Greece.

Wanting something for nothing isn’t Greek to any of us, unfortunately. That’s why we need leaders with the honesty and courage to present a vision more real than government providing ever more goodies on credit ad infinitum.

Credit just doesn’t add up, infinitely. The more you rack up debt, the more finite your future.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Printable PDF

Tags 2016 Presidential race, debt, debt crisis, national debt, Presidential campaign 2016

term limits

Universal Bull

“We have term limits, they’re called elections.”

So goes one argument, famously paraphrased by President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe for an African Union summit: “It is a democracy. If people want a leader to continue, let him continue.”

“All over the world,” Owen Bennett-Jones writes at BBC.com, “leaders…are reluctant to give up power.” He points to a number of cases, mainly in nations struggling for democratic stability:

“The most striking current example,” according to Bennett-Jones, “is Burundi’s President Pierre Nkurunziza who, amidst violent opposition, is campaigning for a third term in office despite the constitution saying he can only have two.” The president’s spokesman acknowledged, “ Nkurunziza indeed believes he is president by divine will.”
In Burkina Faso, thousands clogged the streets after the 27-year presidential incumbent, Blaise Compaore, schemed to evade a constitutional term limit on his office. But facing unrelenting pressure, Compaore soon stepped down.
Speaking about his campaign to have the parliament eliminate term limits so he can run for re-election, Ecuador’s socialist President Rafael Correa told reporters, “The easiest thing would be for me to retire in 2017 as one of the best presidents in our history, as the people refer to me.” Correa’s decision to reluctantly remain in power has sparked protests across the country.

It is easy to recognize the sad abuse of power by these “third world” strongmen. Yet, we are continually fighting politicians in “first world” America.

When will politicians ever learn?

When the people are organized enough to assert power over those politicians … in Ecuador … Burundi … and the good ol’ US of A.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Printable PDF

Tags democracy, dictators, elections, term limits

folly free trade & free markets general freedom individual achievement national politics & policies

Work Longer?

Set aside all the snake oil that sleazy, slippery-tonged solons have sought to sell us, now comes the Bush behind Door #3 to tell the teeming masses of tailing media what we need to do … if Americans want to grow economically as a country, and succeed individually.

We need to work more.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was just casually tossing about that four-letter word in a recent meeting with the editorial board of the Union Leader in Manchester, N.H.:

My aspiration for the country and I believe we can achieve it, is four percent growth as far as the eye can see. Which means we have to be a lot more productive, workforce participation has to rise from its all-time modern lows. It means that people need to work longer hours and, through their productivity, gain more income for their families. That’s the only way we’re going to get out of this rut that we’re in.

Work more? Harder? Longer?

How dare Jeb suggest that our future success, together or individually, should be dependent on us … of all people?

Democrats immediately pounced. A statement from the Democratic National Committee called Bush’s remark “easily one of the most out-of-touch comments we’ve heard so far this cycle.”

“Americans are working pretty hard already & don’t need to work longer hours,” tweeted John Podesta, chairman of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, “they need to get paid more.”

We all “need” a lot of things. The point is we are all better off when we go out and earn what we need.

Well, that’s my point, anyway.

And, perhaps, Jeb Bush’s.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Printable PDF

Tags 2016 Presidential race, economy, Hilary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Presidential campaign 2016

Accountability general freedom tax policy

The People Supreme

“We’re the only state in the nation,” wails Wade Buchanan of the liberal Bell Policy Center, “where you can only raise revenues, taxes, by a vote of the people.”

Buchanan is talking about his state of Colorado and defending his side in the Kerr v. Hickenlooper case, which features 34 card-carrying members of Colorado’s political elite — sitting legislators, former legislators, former U.S. congressmen, local politicians and other assorted bigwigs — suing the voters of Colorado for having the gall to pass the state’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR) initiative back in 1992.

Lovers of big government call TABOR a disaster; most Colorado voters like TABOR and will vote to keep it.

The crux of the case? The ridiculous notion that legislators have some cockamamie constitutional right to levy taxes and spend money without the people empowered with any veto. “When the power to tax is denied,” the suit alleges, “the legislature cannot function effectively to fulfill its obligations in a representative democracy and a Republican Form of Government.”

Immediately, however, the legal issue is whether the politically powerful Kerr plaintiffs even have standing to bring the lawsuit.

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated a 10th Circuit Court of Appeals decision that had granted standing, returning the case to the appeals court “for further consideration in light of Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission.”

That’s good news.

“Most tellingly,” constitutional scholar Rob Natelson points out in a Denver Post column, in that Arizona case “the court praised direct democracy and held that it was ‘in full harmony with the Constitution’s conception of the people as the font of governmental power.’”

Font? We’re the boss.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Printable PDF