Independence forever. Thomas Jefferson survives.
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Author: Redactor
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Dave Barry
Reporters aren’t stupid. We were standing around talking about which of the 900 health-care proposals that nobody’s going to accept is that day’s hot news. They know how silly that is. But that’s what they do. And if they don’t do it, they’ll get fired and someone else will do it. There’s tremendous pressure, if you’re in that system, to be involved and be interested and to care about it. There’ s no room to say, “This is stupid.”
When it comes to the full faith and credit of the Great State of Illinois, three major credit rating companies judge it the lowest in the union. The problem is that state politicians made pension promises they didn’t pay for and still aren’t.
How bad is it? Illinois’s total unfunded pension liability now tops $200 billion dollars – that’s roughly 250 percent of the state’s annual revenue. And growing.
But take, heart!
Gov. Pat Quinn just said that the massive pension shortfall will grow at a slower pace than previously thought, $5 million (instead of $17 million) a day.
Whoopee!
Folks at the Illinois Policy Institute are a little mystified by this pronouncement, though. The projection seems based more on wishes and hope than the straight dope. Besides, “this isn’t the first time the state has predicted that the growth in the state’s unfunded liability would slow,” Institute Senior Fellow Jonathan Ingram writes, noting that “the exact same prediction was made last year based on the actuarial projections made in fiscal year 2011. The systems predicted that the unfunded liability would grow by ‘only’ $5.3 billion in fiscal year 2012.”
The conventional wisdom blames too many years of the legislature shorting the annual payments to the five public-employee retirement funds.
Another way to look at it is simply that politicians are a whole lot better at promising than delivering, and defined benefit (rather than defined contribution) pensions are too tempting to trust to any politician.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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John Adams
The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.
There’s something worse than “printing the myth”: printing government press releases and calling that “journalism.”
In those cases where folks in today’s news media do get their watchdog legs underneath them and yet their questions go unanswered, we citizens need be mightily concerned.
“The Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment,” the Washington Post reported yesterday.
What did they refuse to comment on?
Wiretap stats.
Spokespeople for the Obama Administration have been repeating incessantly that we ought not worry about them grabbing all our phone and Internet and financial information and communications. After all, they tell us, to actually delve into that mountain of metadata to gaze at your personal stuff, the Feds have to lug a rubber stamp across town to a secret court to get approval.
But, lo and behold: the Administrative Office of the United States Court released figures on the number of federal wiretaps in criminal investigations, showing that wiretaps had spiked up 71 percent in 2012. Such wiretaps by state and local police increased only 5 percent.
The average number of federal wiretaps between 1997 and 2009 were 550. But in 2010 the number soared to 1,207. The number went down to 792 the next year and then shot back up to 1,354 last year — a 147 percent increase over the 1997-2009 period.
The report further notes that “A single wiretap can sweep up thousands of communications.” For instance, one wiretap in Los Angeles intercepted more than 185,000 calls — nine of every ten deemed non-incriminating.
Why worry about governments having too much power? Governments have been known to use the power.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Gone are the happy-go-lucky days of buying water and then going home as though it were no big deal.
Elizabeth Daly learned the hard way. As she and her roommates walked toward her car in a dark parking lot, she was accosted by a crew of Virginia state Alcohol Beverage Control agents. One jumped on her car, another drew a gun. They thought she was lugging beer instead of LaCroix sparkling water.
You must be 21 to buy alcohol in Virginia. Daly is 20.
“They were showing unidentifiable badges . . . but we became frightened, as they were not in anything close to a uniform,” she recalled. “I couldn’t put my windows down unless I started my car. . . . They began trying to break the windows. My roommates and I were . . . terrified.”
As they made their escape, the women dialed 911.
The ABC agents charged Daly with counts of assaulting and eluding enforcement officers. (“Assault” because the car brushed past agents as Daly drove away.) She had to spend a night in jail.
We hear so many stories of government-empowered bullies using the feeblest of excuses to terrify luckless innocents. Renegade T-shirt-wearers, estranged husbands of financial-aid scofflaws, barbers . . . and now water-buyers?
Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, says the ABC agents should be fired.
Yes. But when “law enforcement” thugs blatantly violate the rights of innocent persons they should be more than fired. They should be prosecuted. Let’s also shut down agencies that consistently threaten innocent people.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Lew Rockwell
Men as a group . . . are different from women as a group. Northerners are different from Southerners. Californians are different from Texans. Catholics are different from Baptists. Blacks are different from whites. Immigrants are different from natives. The rich are different from the poor. These differences should not be denied, but celebrated, for they are the very source of the division of labor.
Yet our central government attempts to stamp out all these differences by forcing individuals and businesses to act as if they do not exist.
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Vannevar Bush
The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.
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Townhall: The Court v. The People
Over at Townhall, your weekly Common Sense column surveys the current divisions — not so much on the Supreme Court (they change), but in the federal union itself. There are a few keywords worth thinking about: nullification, interposition, delegated powers, unenumerated rights, and (go full-blooded, here) “checks and balances.”
Townhall‘s where to go. But here‘s where to come back.
- This weekend’s column is a reflection on the two cases covered at the end of the week, here on ThisIsCommonSense.com, namely “Too Respectful of Congress?” (Thursday) and “No Right to Defend Your Rights” (Friday). You’ll find links to the Supreme Court decisions on those Common Sense entries.
- There are many sources discussing the origin of judicial review. One of the more recent is The Activist: John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, and the Myth of Judicial Review, by Lawrence Goldstone.
- Thomas Woods’s Nullification: How to Resist Tyranny in the 21st Century, is as good a place as any to begin thinking about the history and live possibility of Madison’s “interposition.”
- It’s always worth re-reading The Constitution . . . and other founding documents. There are many on the Net. But this is one area where you’d expect the government to excel, no? So go to the Library of Congress’s site, and read.
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Video: Decentralize the Schools
Too many people want to push America’s schools in the wrong direction. Neal McCluskey, of the Cato Institute, isn’t one of them: