Author: Redactor

Categories
national politics & policies porkbarrel politics

Good and Bad in the 112th

The 112th Congress is beginning to take shape, and, well, we have good news and bad news.

Good news first: Ron Paul has been slated to chair the Domestic Monetary Policy Subcommittee.

The Texas congressman has been toiling away at the margins of power on Capitol Hill for years. A proponent of a gold standard and a free-marketer of the “Austrian” School, he has been a voice crying in the wilderness. One of the few people in Congress who did not treat Alan Greenspan as a divine oracle, he is now one of Ben Bernanke’s harshest critics.

Of course, after recent events and bailouts and all, Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke has lots of critics.

As chair of the subcommittee that watches over the Fed, Ron Paul has finally attained a position to accomplish something. This is a major reversal in the power structure. We can’t expect miracles (Ron Paul being but one man), but do expect fireworks.

Now, the bad news.

It’s been less than a month since Republicans in the House voted on a moratorium on earmarks. And already they are, reportedly, beginning to feel queasy. Perhaps as a sign of a general turncoatish nature, the next chair of the House Appropriations Committee is set to be Rep. Hal Rogers.

Sixteen-term congressman Rogers has earned a reputation for pushing pork. His hometown has received so much federal largesse it’s called “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

Still, he says he’ll enforce the pork moratorium. We’ll see.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
porkbarrel politics

Bribing Our Way to Bankruptcy

Many of the voters who swept so many Republicans into Congress only a few short years after having swept so many Republicans out of Congress are trying to tell all politicians: “Stop your wastrel ways.”

Republican newcomers often get that the GOP is on probation. But many Republican incumbents don’t. GOP Senators Bob Bennett, Thad Cochran, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and George Voinovich all recently voted against a ban on congressional earmarks.

Is their recalcitrance no big deal? We often hear that earmarks are just a sliver of the overall bloated budget, so fiscal conservatives should therefore stop harping on them.

Well, first, it’s not as if all the individual million-dollar or billion-dollar expenditures don’t add up to the multi-trillions in ballooning budgets and debt now sinking the republic. But, second, assertions about the triviality of earmarks also ignore the fact that rationalizing earmarks and boondoggles as the price of power also makes it easier to rationalize larger-scale incontinent federal spending.

The Heritage Foundation points to a strong correlation between high numbers of earmarks and high spending overall. This isn’t mysterious. The congressman who trains himself to be indifferent to what he does with taxpayers’ monies in “small” ways also learns to inure himself to greater temptations.

Those who can’t resist such temptations enter the current realm of mutual bribery: To get their earmarks, they’ll endorse bills with spending they nominally oppose.

Sweat the small stuff. Including the millions and billions in earmarks.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall responsibility

Pension Declension

The ugliest truth about California’s newest, gimmick-ridden budget, is that it doesn’t address the looming public employee pension issue. Adam Summers, a Reason Foundation policy analyst, gave some figures in the Orange County Register, explaining that these pensions have been “recently pegged at up to roughly $500 billion — roughly $36,000 for every household in California”:

Throw in the $50 billion or so in unfunded retiree health care liabilities, a $10 billion unemployment insurance fund debt, and the state’s $152 billion in general obligation bond debt, and you start to get a fuller sense of the state’s true financial problems.

The current plan to deal with this — reducing pensions for new state hires back to 1999 levels — Summers says was tried before, and failed. And by “failed” I mean revised after the fact and retroactively negated by the state Assembly.

Summers says there’s only one way out:

Politicians can’t continue to merely nibble around the edges of the state’s pension crisis. It’s time to admit that the 401(k)-style retirement plans that are good enough for nearly every private sector worker are going to have to be good enough for state workers, too.

But do politicians have the guts or the principles required? An initiative is needed. No level of government should be allowed to offer any pension not fully invested at the time of wage or salary payment — or promising a specified pay-out.

That would be as revolutionary as the legendary Prop 13.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability initiative, referendum, and recall

The Maine Con

Should taxpayers be forced to fund their own foes?

A group that opposes Maine’s public financing of campaigns — in particular the perverse requirement that the campaign spending of a candidate not participating in the public financing be matched by taxpayer-funded dollars to the coffers of candidates who do participate — is now fighting another abuse of taxpayer dollars.

The Maine Heritage Policy Center has sued the Maine Municipal Association for using government funds to oppose ballot measures designed to save taxpayers money.

MMA doesn’t deny that the two million dollars it used to campaign against several tax-cut initiatives in recent years are government funds. But the front group pretends that it is not really a “government entity,” even though its membership consists of municipal governments in Maine. Far from being a government entity, they say, they merely “provide professional services to our members as a nonprofit organization.” But this is a distinction without a difference.

The Lewiston Sun Journal observes that most folks would be “outraged to learn that our city council had voted to use municipal funds to influence a political campaign. In fact, we might say it is illegal.” Is the nature of what’s going on sanctified if the municipal campaign contributions are being routed through a nominally separate party? The MMA’s own articles of incorporation state that it must be “nonpolitical and nonpartisan.” That hardly describes spending millions in taxpayers’ money to foil tax-cut campaigns.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling general freedom ideological culture nannyism national politics & policies

Fat Lot of Good That’ll Do

It sounded like a good idea — Michelle Obama would get involved in a campaign to reduce childhood obesity. Obesity is a problem, yes, and a good cause for the First Lady. But, today, advocacy must always be paired with legislation.

An AP news story provides all you really need to know:

A child nutrition bill on its way to President Barack Obama — and championed by the first lady — gives the government power to limit school bake sales and other fundraisers that health advocates say sometimes replace wholesome meals in the lunchroom.

So now we are to have federal government’s micro-mismanagement reach far beyond the curriculum. The basic idea being . . . give up on parents. Give up on local control. Go, Washington!

Our national nannies took special care with the bill’s language, adding the category of school fundraisers as a special target of the regulations. Apparently, they can’t stand the fact that, on special occasions, mothers and fathers bake up sugary treats to sell, to support special school activities that affect their kids.

I guess they want us to sell broccoli.

Yup. That’ll send the school band to Disneyland.

The whole bill is a bad idea, and not just because Washington can’t tell special occasions from one’s day-in/day-out diet. The very singling out of special fundraisers for federal attention shows just how far into our lives Washington’s busybodies believe they can insert themselves.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment First Amendment rights government transparency national politics & policies

Secrecy Broken

The “Wikileaks” controversy proceeds to grow and mutate, like Clostridium botulinum in a Petri dish with spoiled pork, and I’ve avoided talking about it up till now.

Wikileaks is a website devoted to publishing leaked documents from governments and other scandal-prone institutions. You probably know the major players, and the various permutations of the story. You can hardly miss them. Because of that, I’m not going to go through the story in detail. Instead, I’d like to take a step back and offer a few “meta-thoughts” . . . ideas that might help produce a good conclusion.

  1. Republican forms of government require a great deal of transparency, though not on everything. There are military secrets and diplomatic info-dumps that, for our security, would best remain secret and un-dumped.
  2. Politicians, soldiers and bureaucrats tend to hate transparency. Why? They don’t like being second-guessed by “non-professionals.” So they often make government more opaque than it should be.
  3. Some of our leaders have tried to put nearly everything foreign-policy-related into the tightest security, demanding high clearances even for viewing. Much of this is self-serving, not truly security-related.
  4. A government worker who breaks security protocols to leak documents can be at once a hero and still prosecutable by law.

Now’s a good time to rethink transparency and our government’s secrecy protocols.

But, rethought or not, no one’s been surprised to learn of more amazing lapses in ethics and judgment on the part of our leaders.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies

Neutrality or Tragedy?

Everybody likes freebies. New York renters often seek apartments advertised with “utilities included.” Why? So they can run their air conditioners 24/7.

Similarly, a lot of people are pushing for something called “Net neutrality.” We must guarantee a “free and open Internet,” they say.

Sounds good. After all, “free” is a good deal, if you can get it. But “free” comes at a cost. “Not having to pay for it” can become “paying through the nose” pretty quickly.

Here’s the problem: The rise of VoIP, streaming video and audio, and similar broadband luxuries has strained the Internet. Regulating the Net for “neutrality” prevents price and quality-of-service discrimination by owners of the Net’s infrastructure.

Might as well require all landlords to provide all utilities “free” . . . distributing the costs of extra usage via basic rent charges. That would be “Apartment neutrality.”

It would also be a big waste, and not just of electricity.

When suppliers of goods aren’t allowed to price and move product to their advantage, we get something  like the “tragedy of the commons.” The term comes from the medieval commons, a field that all villagers could use. They were, historically, overgrazed. Devastated. Hence the need to divvy up the fields into private plots, allowing trade to increase wealth, to the benefit of all.

U.S. regulators, tackling Net neutrality this month, should be wary of laying waste to the Net in the name of “openness.” Never confuse “free” of price with freedom itself.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture too much government

Where Democrats Go Wrong

When we find ourselves in a pickle, it’s a good idea to ask: Where did we go wrong?

I’ve often probed how America got itself into the present mess. I’ve noted how easy it is for politicians to lose touch with the common sense of the American people — so much so that they cannot even imagine balancing a budget while they are in office.

Further, I’ve often castigated Republicans for betraying their promises to cut spending.

But what of Democrats? Where’s the common sense?

When President Obama proposed a non-military pay freeze on federal workers, the Democratic National Committee’s “Organizing for America” (OFA) QUANGO asked its supporters for help. Fine. But what happened? The Democratic base went ape. Bananas. Noodles-out nuts.

Example? David Dayen of the FDL News Desk. “We’ve officially gone around the bend,” he wrote, thereby going ’round the bend. He characterized the carefully worded letter sent out by OFA with a “this is what we’ve been reduced to” snipe.

Dayen and too many other Democrats think their ideology means always increasing government worker pay. Even if government workers prove almost impossible to fire, have great benefits, and comparatively high pay, they must not be asked to make a tiny sacrifice. Not even while others suffer.

If these partisans’ core concern were really helping Americans, including the poor, they wouldn’t be so fixed on keeping federal pay as high as it is.

But, priorities, you know.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

Gore’s Gas-Based Admission

Al Gore gives the impression of someone never willing to acknowledge error if said error happens to be self-serving.

This impression is wrong.

If I have ever suggested that Gore never admits self-serving mistakes, I hereby rescind and repudiate that suggestion. He appears more than willing to retire a dishonest assertion . . . so long as he has another dishonest assertion to replace it with.

Ed Morrissey tells the tale at Hot Air, opining that Al Gore’s revised opinion about the virtue of government subsidies for corn-based ethanol seems just a little too convenient.

Gore now acknowledges that the energy-conversion ratios of first-generation ethanol “are at best very small,” and that corn subsidies probably bid up food prices. He even admits that he pushed for the funding to help farmers in states like Tennessee and Iowa. So it came to pass that taxpayers paid billions, in part to help Gore run for president.

Wait, there’s more.

Having recanted his support for “first-generation” ethanol, Gore now wants to use wood and grass to make ethanol. A new and better way, n’est-ce pas? No. There’s this small detail: Grass etc.-based ethanol is even more inefficient than corn-based ethanol.

Why top a bad blunder at taxpayer expense with an even worse blunder at taxpayer expense? Could this have anything to do with Al Gore’s investment in Abengoa Bioenergy, a firm begging for government subsidies for second-generation ethanol?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall too much government

The Citizen’s Stop Sign

What an election year. It’s not just the drubbing dealt to many statist incumbents that warrants a little triumphalism. We can also cheer about ballot measures whose passage means the defeat of very specific attacks on the citizenry.

Several local referendums targeted all those ticket-triggering red-light cameras that have been popping up. The main purpose of the gotcha-gizmos seems to be lunging for the wallets of hapless motorists, not enhancing anybody’s safety.

Voters are rejecting this fancy tax on driving. In Houston, a group called Citizens Against Red Light Cameras pushed for a ballot question to chuck the cameras. Voters passed it, despite the apoplectic opposition of the city council and the company operating the cameras, American Traffic Solutions. Camera ordinances were also felled in two Ohio towns, Chillicothe and Heath, and in College Station, Texas. In Anaheim, California, 73 percent said Yes to banning red-light cameras.

It was a tougher battle in Mukilteo, Washington, where ATS tried to stop voters from deciding on the cameras. Citizen activist Tim Eyman, who also has a slew of successful tax-limitation initiatives under his belt, led the effort to combat that obstructionism, and the state supreme court ordered ATS to back off. The kill-the-cameras measure went on to pass by 70 percent.

It’s great whenever voters call a halt to political predation. By no method can they do so more directly and effectively than via the right of initiative and referendum.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.