Author: Redactor

Categories
Accountability insider corruption

Nutty Acorn Shenanigans Never Stop

ACORN, a government-funded community activist group long noted for hard-left stances, has been earning more and more notoriety for sundry shady practices.

During the presidential campaign, the organization got in trouble for voter fraud. ACORN officials blamed a few bad apples. But phony registrations filed by its employees have been discovered in a slew of states. In 2008, 14 states began investigating the group for fraud.

Then there’s the ease with which many ACORN employees are willing to advise sex slave traders on how to avoid taxes.

As you no doubt know, in September of this year, Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe posed as a prostitute and a pimp at many ACORN offices. They pretended to seek advice on how to avoid paying taxes for income from the child prostitutes they said they were importing into the country. They recorded these visits with a hidden camera, and employees in all too many offices proved eager to help. ACORN responded by firing implicated employees . . . and suing Giles and O’Keefe.

Now it is coming to light that — to save money — ACORN bosses have been telling paid employees to work for them as volunteers, instead, and earn their pay by collecting unemployment insurance. This, as blogger Michael McCray notes, would be a form of fraud.

A fraud to match other ACORN policies, I guess, and the handout mentality that permeates our nation’s capital.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Second Amendment rights

Infringed Upon

Call me a literalist. If I see a sign saying “Keep Off the Grass,” I assume that instruction applies to you, and me, and everybody but the lawn’s gardener.

If my dog Bugsy is on leash, I’ll keep him off the lawn, too.

Same for the Bill of Rights. Even the notoriously controversial Second Amendment seems fairly clear: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

What part of “shall not be infringed” is hard to understand?

I just received a fascinating short article from the Cascade Policy Institute in Portland, Oregon, by Karla Kay Edwards. Ms. Edwards writes about current court cases regarding gun regulation. She explains that “in June 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment applies directly to an individual’s right to bear arms. However, the decision did not clarify whether states and other government entities can limit those rights.”

She states it well. But, still, oddly. Don’t you find it a tad strange that rights listed in the Constitution as not to “be infringed” can, in the next breath, be spoken of as limitable?

Ms Edwards believes that such issues should be decided by the courts. I agree. But I’d prefer it if legislatures would simply not infringe on our rights in the first place.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Bernanke’s Pseudo-Semi-Solution

I’m not convinced. I’m not persuaded by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s recent comments about how we must start trimming the nose hairs of the federal government’s runaway deficit spending.

Bernanke has been a great enabler of economic disaster. By pumping so much easy credit into the economy after the Great Internet Bubble popped early in the decade, Bernanke and his predecessor made it easy as pie to pile up all the bad housing loans that produced the Great Housing Bubble late in the decade.

His new solution? Massive new multi-billion bailouts of bad economic actors. More and faster pumping of the money supply. More and faster enabling of bad investments and bad debt by working to keep federal-fund interest rates vanishingly low.

Now Bernanke wants America to reduce its sky-high deficits — $1.42 trillion for fiscal year 2009. He says we need a “clear commitment to reduce federal deficits over time.” Sure Ben, sure. I don’t disagree. But talk is cheap. Especially vague, general talk that your own actions persistently belie.

Bernanke seems to have some inkling that the fantasy economy can’t persist forever. He has, alas, no real idea of how to return to reality. He’s the guy who blows up a dam and then wants to lay down some twigs to stop the flood.

Stop blowing up the economy, Ben.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
property rights U.S. Constitution

Not Robbed Until Proven Guilty

You are “innocent until proven guilty” in America, with one big exception: Under civil forfeiture laws, police don’t have to prove that a crime has actually been committed in order to seize your property. And once your boat or car is stolen by your government, the burden falls to you to prove your stuff is innocent.

Police departments are getting rich from the loot they seize from folks never convicted of a crime. As the Institute for Justice argues, civil forfeiture laws provide an ugly incentive for police “to enforce the laws in ways designed to maximize forfeiture income rather than to minimize crime.”

Now a challenge has reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Alvarez v. Smith concerns six people whose property was seized by Chicago police, though three of them were never charged with a crime.

The Institute for Justice, the Cato Institute, the ACLU and the Reason Foundation have filed amicus briefs arguing that due process was denied.

In favor of more free-wheeling civil forfeiture are a number of state governments, the National Conference of State Legislatures, the National Association of Counties, the National League of Cities, the U.S. Conference of Mayors and other groups representing government entities that spend the proceeds from the seized loot.

During oral arguments, Judge Sonia Sotomayor asked the pertinent question, “You take the car and then you investigate?”

Backwards justice is no justice at all.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

Dysfunctional Judgment

The Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court recently declared the state’s government “dysfunctional.”

But Judge Ronald George didn’t bother to tell this to his employers, the people of California. Instead, the judge delivered his speech all the way across the continent, in Massachusetts, at his induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Judge George specifically blames Golden State voters as chief culprits in California’s severe budget woes. While admitting that legislators lack the “political will” to make the tough spending cuts or tax hikes that he believes necessary, George nonetheless says there may have to be “some fundamental reform of the voter Initiative process.”

What the judge doesn’t tell his earnest East Coast audience is that less than 10 percent of amendments to the California constitution come through initiatives.

The voters, he claims, are over-influenced by special interests. But he neglects to mention that the much-loved, much-hated tax-cutting Proposition 13 — and Prop 140, the measure placing term limits on legislators — were both heavily outspent by the state’s most powerful lobbies. Both nevertheless prevailed at the ballot box.

Lastly, his Honor bellyaches that he and fellow jurists are “called upon to resolve legal challenges to voter Initiatives” and sometimes “incur the displeasure of the voting public.”

My heart bleeds for them, of course, but isn’t adjudicating disputes sort of expected of judges?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
political challengers

Enemies Lists

Courtesy of the Obama administration, we’re experiencing more and more Nixonian moments.

Take medical reform. The health insurers started out in Obama’s camp. But a shuffling of policies and a few insurance companies began making obvious points about how this or that feature would raise costs, not decrease them.

And the Obama administration struck back.

I’ve talked about the Humana gag order, how our bureaucrats in Washington decided to tell insurance companies to shut up about reform proposals. Congress gagged the gaggers.

Then a health insurance association released a study suggesting that the cost of insurance would likely go up under legislation being proposed in Congress. The president retaliated by threatening to take away the industries’ immunity from anti-trust laws.

What? An important policy change, and the president threatens it not to achieve a better outcome, or for constitutional reasons, but merely to punish and thereby silence opposition to his policies? How petty. How dangerous.

On the floor of the Senate, Lamar Alexander advised the Obama administration to play a little less hardball. Alexander warned that by creating an “enemies list,” including people in the media, the White House is heading into Nixon territory.

“An enemies list only denigrates the presidency, and the republic itself.” An old Nixon aide, Senator Alexander should know.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Common Sense

Robbing Words of Meaning?

Words change over time, in meaning as well as sound. Since much of this comes from misuse, ignorance, laziness, and even wordplay, the more you know and the less fun-loving you are, the more a scold about words you will likely be.

Over the long run, though, for each loss in meaning we gain another. Might as well live with it.

In any case, the history of words can be fascinating. For example, did you know that “rob” and “robe” have the same ancestor?

Rob means to steal by force; robe means a loose flowing garment. Both hail from the same Old High German word, which I won’t try to pronounce. “Robe” comes close to the original meaning, of “clothes.” The original became synonymous with “stealing by force” because, in times long past, one of the most common items to grab from another was clothing. When one was robbed, one often had to disrobe. It was your robes you were being robbed of. Clothes were that valuable.

No wonder, then, when clothing was a robber’s favored booty, to become poor meant utter destitution. The destitute often wandered around with nary a scrap on them.

Not only have words changed, times have, too.

When next I catch a word in painful transition, I’ll remind myself that it’s more like a peaceful clothing change than a robbery.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall tax policy

Money, Money, Money

Money. Politicians like to spend it. People — especially special interests — like to get it. And taxpayers really don’t much like having to pay for all that spending.

So our representatives try to procrastinate their balancing of spending and revenue. How? With debt. Hence our yearly unbalanced budgets.

At the federal level, deficits soar. Many states, however, have constitutional spending limitations and balanced budget requirements. What difference do such limits make?

Well, Professor Barry Poulson, of the Independence Institute, points out that a few years before Colorado passed the Taxpayer Bill of Rights (or TABOR), limiting state spending growth to the increase in population plus inflation, California’s legislature was abandoning the GANN Amendment, a similar limit.

Says Poulson, “Over the period since TABOR was passed, Colorado has experienced one of the highest rates of economic growth in the nation, while California has experienced retardation in economic growth.”

Two states — Maine and Washington — have initiatives on their ballot this November that are very similar to Colorado’s TABOR. The special interest opponents to these measures, most notably government employee unions, have raised millions more than supporters. Soon voters will be pummeled with ads claiming that the sky will fall if there is any limit on state spending growth.

Of course, the fiscal sky has already fallen. Voters should support these measures as the best way to pick up the pieces.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
tax policy

Visible Taxes, Invisible Support

There’s a lot of talk about the Value Added Tax and its various sister excises, like the Retail Sales Tax and the GST, or Goods and Services Tax. A lot of countries have one or more of these. They raise a lot of revenue, but require mounds of record-keeping and can quickly become oppressive.

Economist David Henderson recently noted the strange fortunes of Canada’s GST. When it was imposed, it cost the party that sponsored it — the so-called “Progressive Conservative” party — nearly everything. Canadians so loathed the tax that they punished the PCs by throwing them out of office — way out: Their representation in Parliament went from 295 seats to two.

Some repudiation, eh?

Henderson wryly notes that the Liberal Party, which picked up majority support, did not abolish the tax as promised. Are you shocked?

Nearly everyone feels the GST, nearly everyone pays it. One reason to support such a visible tax, Henderson says, “rather than less-visible taxes is so that voters have a feel for the magnitude of the tax. But precisely because that’s true, they’ll punish the party that imposes it.”

Hey politicians — I have a better idea. Get rid of some less-than-visible spending. It would hurt the parties a lot less. And it really would solve the tight budget problem, making the need for a visible tax vanish.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

A Friend in Pennsylvania

“Slow, corrupt and expensive is no way to run a state government.” That’s what Pittsburgh Post Gazette columnist Brian O’Neill wrote recently about the Pennsylvania Legislature.

The state budget remains unset three months past deadline. O’Neill bemoaned that for the seventh consecutive year “America’s Largest Full-Time State Legislature has been unable to perform its principal task on time.”

What a mess! What to do?

O’Neill suggests cutting the 253-member legislature down to 201. He points out that this 20 percent cut would translate to savings of $60 million dollars or more a year.

Sounds good: Fewer politicians, less cost. But reducing the number of legislators won’t solve the problem. It may make it worse.

A Pennsylvania senator represents 250,000 citizens, a representative only 61,000. Compare that to California, where a state senator represents more than 900,000 people and a representative 460,000. And California’s budget is a bigger mess.

The math is simple: A single citizen’s voice is more pronounced to a Pennsylvania state legislator. The cost to challenge an incumbent is far less, there, as well.

So don’t cut the size of the legislature. But by all means cut the cost.

The problem Pennsylvanians have in reforming their state is that — shockingly — self-interested politicians are resistant to reform, and the voters lack an initiative process to do the job themselves.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.