Author: Redactor

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall local leaders

A City in Need of CPR

Next Tuesday, Cincinnati voters will decide Issue 4, a charter amendment petitioned onto the ballot by a citizens’ group called Cincinnati for Pension Reform (CPR).

If passed, the initiative will put newly hired city employees into a 401(k)-style retirement program, while protecting the pensions of current city retirees and workers through annual audits, publicly reported results, and requiring the city to take steps to close any fund deficit.

The Queen City’s public pension system is in deep trouble. Even by the city’s rosy accounting, it’s only 61 percent funded, with a whopping unfunded liability of $862 million. Moody’s recently downgraded the city’s credit rating, specifically because of its pension liabilities.

Nonetheless, Issue 4 faces fierce opposition from a group “primarily funded” by government workers’ unions. “In just two weeks,” reports the Cincinnati Enquirer, “the committee raised $207,970 . . . It received contributions from only two individuals, totaling $750, including a $500 contribution from former acting Cincinnati city manager and current Dayton city manager Tim Riordan.”

Jeff Harmon, president of a union representing 850 city workers said, “This measure is going to lead to higher taxes and possible lawsuits for the city and would potentially bankrupt Cincinnati.”

Why would actually funding the promises the city has already made to workers “lead to higher taxes” or “bankrupt Cincinnati”?

Who would file those “possible lawsuits”? It doesn’t take a genius to realize that this is a polite way of saying: If you don’t vote the way we want, we’ll sue.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

David Hume

It is seldom, that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. Slavery has so frightful an aspect to men accustomed to freedom, that it must steal upon them by degrees, and must disguise itself in a thousand shapes, in order to be received.

Categories
ideological culture too much government

Surprised by Obamacare

So, wait, Obamacare is not free?

Pre-Obamacare, George Schwab paid $228 a month for health insurance. Now he must pay $1,208 a month for a comparable plan. “The president told the American people numerous times that ‘If you like your coverage, you can keep it.’ How can we keep it if it has been eliminated? How can we keep it if the premium has been increased 430 percent . . . ?” He sounds surprised.

Michael Hood paid $324 a month. Now it’s $895. “The president told us Obamacare would make health insurance affordable and reduce costs. It is now impossible for our family to afford private health insurance.” He sounds surprised.

Tom Waschura is getting socked with a $10,000-per-year addition to his family policy. “I was laughing at Boehner — until the mail came today.” He sounds surprised.

Cindy Vinson must pay $1,800 more a year. “I want people to have health care. I just didn’t realize I would be the one who was going to pay for it personally.” She sounds surprised.

At the Healthcare.gov Facebook page, Dema Zinger says “I am so disappointed. These prices are outrageous and there are huge deductibles.” She sounds surprised.

If government massively transfers private insurance policy costs from each according to ability (younger, healthier, richer) to each according to alleged need (older, sicker, poorer), there’s a good chance the former will end up paying more whether they liked their pre-Obamacare policies or not.

Which is a surprise because . . . ?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture national politics & policies

Greenspan’s Tarnished Standard

Long ago, before becoming Federal Reserve Inflater-in-Chief, Alan Greenspan advocated a gold standard.

The idea is that everybody pays for things in gold, a natural medium of exchange. Receipts for gold used for convenience in trade are “backed” and can be easily redeemed. With appropriate protections in place, politicians can’t dilute the value of money by printing more receipts or by shuffling phosphor dots on a computer screen.

But our world is very different.

At the Fed, Greenspan oversaw a lot of credit expansion, encouraging a horde of folks who couldn’t afford homes to take out mortgages. Any discussion of the financial crisis of 2007-2008, or why “we” “failed to predict” it, must discuss Fed policies and other government interventions.

Not, though, if you’re a former Federal Reserve chairman intimately aware of those policies and fully capable of grasping their baleful effects. Then you blather about “irrational exuberance,” or, in a new article for Foreign Affairs magazine, Keynes’s “animal spirits.”

Not a word about how monetary inflation spawns malinvestments that must eventually be washed away. Indeed, the best interpretation of Greenspan’s new book, or his appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, is that Greenspan is doing his utmost to deflect attention from his own disastrous record.

He’d rather have us believe that “free markets” failed in 2008, not — oh, no! — the policies he himself had pushed since obtaining his seat as head honcho at America’s inflationary central bank.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

David Hume

Disputes with men, pertinaciously obstinate in their principles, are, of all others, the most irksome; except, perhaps, those with persons, entirely disingenuous, who really do not believe the opinions they defend, but engage in the controversy, from affectation, from a spirit of opposition, or from a desire of showing wit and ingenuity, superior to the rest of mankind. The same blind adherence to their own arguments is to be expected in both; the same contempt of their antagonists; and the same passionate vehemence, in inforcing sophistry and falsehood. And as reasoning is not the source, whence either disputant derives his tenets; it is in vain to expect, that any logic, which speaks not to the affections, will ever engage him to embrace sounder principles.

Categories
media and media people national politics & policies too much government

The End—er, ACA—Is Near

First, NBC’s Nightly News anchor Brian Williams reported that the “website for the president’s new health care law is back up tonight after yet another technical problem over the weekend that prevented people from signing up for health insurance . . . yet again.” Then he went on, bemoaning, “For many middle-class Americans who buy their own health insurance, there could be another frustration and that is ‘sticker shock’ — after some learned they must buy new policies that cover more, but cost more as well.”

Couldn’t be. In pushing the Affordable Care Act (ACA), President Barack Obama had promised, “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”

And presumably “afford” your plan, too. (Well, there are good old-fashioned government subsidies!)

Williams then turned to correspondent Peter Alexander, who announced that the absolute catastrophe of the healthcare.gov website “is masking what is the real issue here, how much these plans will actually cost.”

At Forbes weeks ago, the headline to Avik Roy’s column suggested a connection: “Obamacare’s Website Is Crashing Because It Doesn’t Want You To Know How Costly Its Plans Are.”

A website that crashes to hide the cost of insurance the law demands you purchase seems far-fetched. Next they’ll claim the Administration somehow knew so many folks would lose their insurance policies.

Er, well, “That millions will lose or have to change their individual policies is not a surprise to the administration” noted Alexander.

Say, what?

NBC News found “buried in the 2010 Obamacare regulations language predicting that ‘A reasonable range for the percentage of individual policies that would terminate . . . is 40 percent to 67 percent.’”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
media and media people national politics & policies

Wacky Ways to MSNBC the World

Alex Wagner of MSNBC’s “Now with Alex Wagner” fame decided her fellow network hosts had fecklessly failed to exhaust the world’s reservoir of inane 30-second political pronouncements. So, her vignette informs us:

Minimum wage was mentioned in the State of the Union earlier this year and then it wasn’t brought back up again. This should be something we think about and talk about every single week. This is one of those building-block issues that should supersede almost anything else we have. Economic security is foundational to American success.

Where to start?

Perhaps, by wondering if any serious person really thinks the minimum wage is an issue so paramount in the economy that it “should supersede almost anything else we have.”

Er, “we have”? Who’s editing scripts over there?

But let’s cut to the chase: Ms. Wagner is arguing that “economic security” not only comes before “American success,” but is “foundational” to that success.

Hmmmm?

According to the great Wikipedia in cyberspace, “economic security” is “the condition of having stable income or other resources to support a standard of living now and in the foreseeable future.” So, does Wagner really mean to suggest that before Americans were able to achieve success, wealth, we already had guaranteed to us plenty of steady income to finance a fine and dandy standard of living for as far off into the future as we could foresee?

Americans worked hard for this wealth; it wasn’t legislated.

Economic “success” creates economic security, not the other way around.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Jean-Baptiste Say

The external commerce of all countries is inconsiderable, compared with the internal.

Categories
links

Townhall: Who can you trust, Virginia?

Virginians hold their noses on the way to the polls, despite the fact that one candidate doesn’t stink at all. See this weekend’s Common Sense column over at Townhall, and come back here for more reading.

Categories
video

Video: The Spanish-American War

The war we tend to forget about, but the one that shaped America’s course for the next century:

http://youtu.be/taHAOlaY1a0

This is a good PBS documentary, and quite long, with some substance. Question for admirers of Teddy Roosevelt: Do you still rate him high after viewing this? Is love of war for adventure’s sake really that good a thing?