Author: CS Admin

Categories
Accountability folly ideological culture national politics & policies responsibility

Politics as Painfully Usual

deficit, congress, budget, folly, Medicare, tax cuts, fiscal responsibility

The crazed nature of our leaders’ willingness to spend beyond revenue, and accumulate debt, is not limited to one party. Both Democrats and Republicans are responsible for their outrageously perverse fiscal policies. 

Their irresponsibility hides in plain view, and can be seen in most of the major policy discussions of our time. Take two: 

  1. the Democrats’ idea of putting every American on Medicare and 
  2. the Republicans’ current tax reduction bill.

Though the Republicans often pretend to be all about something called “fiscal conservatism,” their murky tax plan is not fiscally sound. Not yet, anyway — after all, it is “evolving.”

And I expect it to get worse, not better.

“The current plan proposes about $5.8 trillion in tax reduction offset by about $3.6 trillion in base-​broadening offsets, meaning that it would result in a $2.2 trillion deficit increase over the next decade,” Peter Suderman summarizes over at Reason.

They have a number of cuts in the works, but also plan to spend more on defense and the like. The debt would go up.

But if the Republicans are hypocritical and irresponsible, the Democrats add sheer insanity to their irresponsibility. 

“Medicare for All” is pushed by Senator Bernie Sanders, who serves Vermont, where a similar universal system was enacted, only to be repealed after it proved unaffordable even with huge tax increases. All single-​payer/​socialized medicine proposals would require whopping tax increases to work, and the increases in spending would inevitably yield greater deficits.

Besides, Medicare is heading for financial Armageddon. Adding more burdens to a system that they cannot (or simply will not) now make solvent? 

Only a politician could consider such a “solution.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Art by John Goodridge on Flickr

 

Categories
folly ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

A Special Place in Heck?

Hillary Clinton, Trump voters, Trump, women, woman, vote, election, democracy,

Former First Lady scolds women for not voting … for a former First Lady.

Yes, “Michelle Obama,” the BBC headlined last week, “scolds female Trump voters.”

Need you ask why? You probably have already guessed.

“Any woman who voted against Hillary Clinton voted against their own voice,” Mrs. Obama remarked at a Boston conference.

Though a majority of women who voted cast their ballots for Mrs. Clinton, a slightly smaller majority of white women voted for Donald Trump.

And to those women who did not vote for Hillary? “Well, to me that just says, you don’t like your voice.”

The idea that one woman candidate can serve as “the voice” for all women is not merely absurd. It is sexist. But it is something that this most recent First Lady shares with the former First Lady who just lost a major election. Yes, Hillary Clinton has said much the same kind of thing. And Madeline Albright, Secretary of State under Clinton’s husband’s command, famously argued “there is a special place in hell” for women who refuse to toe the line and vote Clinton II.

Heck, there is a special place for women who think, appraise and choose against social pressure: America. Here people matter as individuals, as persons, not as members of their race, religion, sex, or … political party.

But the arrogance of these women leaders shows no understanding of effrontery. “You like the thing you’re told to like,” Mrs. Obama belittled female Trump voters.

Truth is: women were repeatedly told to like Hillary for president. But they refused to do as they were told, which is why Mrs. Clinton and Mrs. Obama are attacking them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Categories
Accountability local leaders moral hazard national politics & policies term limits

Renewed Interest in Self-Service

Michigan, term limits, scam, reform

“Michigan’s strictest-​in-​the-​nation term limits law will force nearly 70 percent of state senators out of office in 2019 and more than 20 percent of representatives,” reports the Detroit News, “a mass turnover that is fueling renewed interest in reform.”

What?!! Could term limitation laws actually make our poor underpaid and overworked politicians vacate their powerful perches … even when they don’t want to? 

Heaven forbid!

Who could have foreseen this strange turn of events, whereby limits on the number of terms politicians can stay in office would mandate that politicians, having reached that limit, would be summarily cast out?*

Of course, that “renewed interest in reform” comes not from citizens, but politicians.

Oh, and powerful lobbyists and special interests. 

The paper continues: “Term limits remain popular with the voting public, but critics say Michigan rules have thrust inexperienced legislators into complex policy issues they may be ill-​equipped to address.”

Rich Studley, the Michigan Chamber of Commerce’s head-​honcho, argues that “experience really matters.” His lobbying outfit, “an influential business group with significant financial resources,” is working to organize a ballot measure to weaken the limits it has long opposed.

“Any reform plan is unlikely to extend or repeal term limits,” explains the News, “but may instead allow legislators to serve longer in the House or Senate.”

Come again? If legislators could serve “longer” than currently allowed, that would clearly “extend” the limits.

I smell a scam swirling around Lansing. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* The “mass turnover” consists of 26 of 38 senators termed-​out and 24 of 110 in the House. Yet, there were 25 senators and 34 representatives termed-​out in 2010, and the state survived.

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Categories
Accountability general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies

Not So Bad, Communism?

New York Times, apologist, China, Soviet Union, communism, Walter Duranty

First the good news. The New York Times has repudiated Walter Duranty’s 1930s-​era “journalism” for whitewashing — “underestimating” — the murderousness of Soviet Communism.

So that’s done, right? 

Whatever its failings today, the paper will certainly no longer allow writers to use its august pages to discount blatant systematic evil. 

Right?

But Helen Raleigh, a writer for The Federalist who is an immigrant from China, finds that the Times does indeed persist in glossing over the sins of Communism. In commemorating the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the paper is “once again proving itself Communism’s greatest apologist” through articles variously arguing that “women had better sex under socialism to now claiming China’s Communist revolution taught Chinese women to ‘dream big’…”

As if, suggests Raleigh, Duranty’s ghost were still calling the shots.

In rebuttal, she recounts what so many people suffered under Communism, as exemplified by the fate of her Aunt San. 

At age 15, her aunt was forced by Mao’s government to leave the city and work in the countryside, separately from her siblings, who were forced to do the same but in different villages. Cutting family ties was important “so people could devote themselves 100 percent to the Communist Party’s causes.” 

Primitive farming, mandatory singing of gruesomely cheerful revolutionary songs, food rations, malnutrition, ritual humiliation, derailed education, derailed or extinguished lives. 

Just a few of the standard ingredients of the totalitarianism that, according to the Times of 2017, taught women to “dream big.”

Which should remind us: despite only a few countries’ close ties to the doctrine — Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea — Communism’s threat to world peace, prosperity, and freedom remains big.

The Times must change.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Categories
general freedom initiative, referendum, and recall political challengers Regulating Protest

Self-​Determination, Anyone?

An election can be a clarifying event. 

So can the suppression of an election.

Over the weekend, more than two million Catalans, greater than 40 percent of those eligible, voted in a referendum on independence from Spain. To which Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy declared, “There was no independence referendum in Catalonia today.”

Rajoy certainly tried to stop it. 

Spanish authorities shut down referendum websites and sent hordes of national police into the region to seize ballots and forcibly prevent people from voting. News reports are full of those police using rubber bullets on crowds, smashing their way into polling places and roughing up people. 

Nearly a thousand citizens of Catalonia were injured in various clashes.

While the referendum result was a lopsided 90 percent opting for independence, previous polling shows Catalans split on the question. Perhaps the suppression worked best with those opposed to separation from Spain, who seem to have stayed home.

Let the people have a fair vote and follow the result. Anything less suggests support for the unthinkable: holding the Catalans in Spain against their will.  

Last week, Iraqi Kurds also held a referendum in which voters overwhelmingly favored separation — in this case from Iraq and for the formation of their own wholly independent nation. And, likewise, others, including the United States, tried to block the vote. Thankfully, not by force. 

Yet. Turkey and Iran oppose an independent Kurdistan because they fear it will embolden demands by their own Kurdish populations for greater autonomy. Or independence.

In a world with respect for freedom, the principle is obvious: self-​determination. Take it as far as you like. 

Or even as far as Ludwig von Mises took it.*

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

 

* “The right of self-​determination,” Mises wrote in Liberalism (1927), “in regard to the question of membership in a state thus means: whenever the inhabitants of a particular territory, whether it be a single village, a whole district, or a series of adjacent districts, make it known, by a freely conducted plebiscite, that they no longer wish to remain united to the state to which they belong at the time, but wish either to form an independent state or to attach themselves to some other state, their wishes are to be respected and complied with. This is the only feasible and effective way of preventing revolutions and civil and international wars.”

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Categories
folly ideological culture national politics & policies political challengers U.S. Constitution

O That Wacky Gerrymandering

HIllary Clinton, Right Wing Conspiracy, gerrymander, states convention, lies

Hillary Clinton: always wrong.

Oh, I’m sure that when she tells the maid “We need milk,” she’s accurate enough. Otherwise — forget it.

Her latest howlers pertain to the movement to convene a Convention of States. If two thirds of the states call for the convention, it “will be” convened, per the U.S. Constitution. If 38 states approve a convention-​proposed amendment, it will be added to the Constitution.

Different pro-​convention groups support different amendments, on everything from a balanced budget to spending limits to term limits. U.S. Term Limits is promoting a Term Limits Convention to propose an amendment for congressional term limits. 

A great idea.

Clinton, though, sees calamity: “The right wing, aided and funded by the Mercers, Koch brothers, etc. [sic], is very serious about calling a constitutional convention,” she warned recently.

“Part of their gerrymandering is to control state legislatures, elect Republican governors, and to call a constitutional convention [no, a convention of states] and,” the author of What Happened elaborates, “if you really get deep into what they are advocating, limits on the First Amendment, no limits on the Second Amendment, limits on criminal justice … [A] very insidious right-​wing agenda.”

Gee, the old multiple-​fallacies-​and-​vague-​ominous-​assertions-​per-​second trick! 

First, how to “gerrymander” statewide gubernatorial elections? 

Or “gerrymander” the enthusiasm of millions for restraints on government? 

Or apply the districting concept to the Founders’ constitutional provision for end-​running Congress?

As for the political issues she blunderingly raises, Clinton seems to regard any political disagreement whatever with herself as proof of billionaire-​funded “right-​wing conspiracy.” 

Well, left-​wing conspirators always say such things.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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