Author: Redactor

Categories
too much government

The Ceanneidigh Case

“You don’t have a paycheck, you don’t file taxes, you have no income.”

You can’t say that welfare caseworkers aren’t helpful. A man calling himself Ted Ceanneidigh walked into a Maine welfare office and presented his problem. He worked for himself. He had a lucrative, cash-​only business and didn’t pay taxes. He had plenty of money and drove a Corvette. He showed his business card, which incorporated a certain well-​known leaf as a distinctive symbol (and it wasn’t Canada’s maple leaf). Interestingly, he said he operated his parents’ fishing business, though that was going under — all they knew was that the boats were going out and money was being placed into their bank account. He was requesting the state’s subsidized medical assistance, though he had enough money to be able to afford private insurance —but that, he said, “doesn’t matter.”

That’s when the Maine civil servant advised Mr. “Ceanneidigh” to keep his income hidden. And offered him government assistance in medical care. After all, it made a sort of bureaucratic sense: The man couldn’t show a paycheck, didn’t file taxes. Obviously no income!

This was a setup, of course, a private “sting” operation organized by the Maine Heritage Policy Center. You can watch the video on YouTube.

It showed something interesting: The narrow focus of Health and Human Services caseworkers. They are there to give out “welfare.” Even to criminals. Even if it bankrupts the state.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

The Costs of a Good Cause

Costs are what we give up for what we want. Focus only on a transaction, and that McChicken sandwich “costs” only a bit over a buck. But ultimately that McChicken costs you what you give up in your budget because you purchased it: a candy bar, a chocolate milk, or a tune on iTunes.

Nearly everything has costs, often hidden. 

Take Michele Obama’s anti-​obesity campaign. The Hunger-​Free Kids Act, the legislative kicker of the First Lady’s cause, withholds money from schools that don’t provide a rigorous well-​balanced menu. Kids must take a variety of fruits and veggies with each meal. Must!

The regulation will cost local school districts about $7 billion to comply. Cash-​strapped school districts. It will also cost quite a lot in thrown-​away food, as kids are “required” to take food they don’t intend to eat.

And then there’s the cost in reduced nutrition. 

It appears that kids like flavored milk products. You know, chocolate milk, strawberry-​flavored milk, etc. But high fructose corn syrup (which was foisted on our population by the federal government in the first place, via huge subsidies to corn farmers in general and Archer Daniels Midland in particular) is now a no-​no. Flavored milks are on the way out. 

The cost of cutting them?

Well, kids get 70 percent of their milk from flavored milks. Take away their chocolate, and … the result, for many, will be no milk at all.

That’s how a pro-​nutrition regulation can end up reducing nutrition.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

Wisconsin’s Kumbaya Moment

With all our divisive politics, who would’ve thought it would take a spate of recalls in Wisconsin to bring folks together in democratic unity.

Whether we root for the blue team, the red one or seek a third color — green or something — we can all celebrate that an election was held Tuesday. 

It was a special recall election of state legislators — made all the more special because it was called by citizens. 

Miffed at Democrats for leaving the state to block a quorum in the senate or incensed at Republicans for passing legislation removing collective bargaining for most unionized state workers, Wisconsin voters didn’t just have to sit there and take it. Empowered by their state’s recall law, they gathered hundreds of thousands of voter signatures. 

Six incumbent Republicans were on Tuesday’s ballot. Four held their seats and two were defeated by Democrats, who fell just one seat short of grabbing the majority. Two incumbent Democrats still face recalls next Tuesday. 

The Progressive Change Campaign Committee told supporters:

Last night, we stood in a crowded square outside the state Capitol in Madison. Teachers, fire fighters, police officers, moms, and dads chanted, “This is what democracy looks like.”

Republicans and Tea Party leaders declared victory in maintaining the majority. Gov. Scott Walker, perhaps the subject of a recall next year, told the MacIver Institute, “I’ve had great confidence in the voters.”

It’s a Kumbaya moment! At least, as close as we’re likely to get.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Default by a Thousand Cuts

Alan Greenspan half-​smilingly argues that U.S. Treasury bonds will never be defaulted because “we can always print money.” How reassuring. 

It’s one thing to pull money out of the proverbial magic cookie jar and place it in bank ledgers (“high-​powered money,” or QE1, QE2) while people are substituting consumption with saving, fearful of the near-​term prospects (increasing their “demand for money”). It’s quite another to do that while people expect prices only to rise. Massive increase in the supply of money (“printing money”) while people anticipate inflation (lowered “demand for money”) can lead to runaway inflation, hyperinflation.

America hasn’t experienced that since the Civil War. But Germany has (after World War I), as has Zimbabwe (just recently). It can ruin a whole way of life.

After Germany’s hyperinflation, Nazism arose. 

Greenspan may have been trying to make a subtle point, but the blunt point remains: Default is likely, for inflation itself serves as a form of default. Under Greenspan’s scenario, the Federal Reserve, conspiring with Treasury, would, by “simply” printing money, pay debt with decreased-​value dollars. 

The ancient Chinese had a perverse form of torturous execution: Death by a thousand cuts. Inflation is like that, it’s torture for almost everyone, default by a … gazillion devaluations.

The only way around this is to make very different cuts — in federal spending.

That’s not torture, that’s the road to recovery. 

It’s unlikely, of course, because, to politicians and insiders, cutting spending seems like torture.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

Voters Ruin Everything

William Endicott, former deputy managing editor of The Sacramento Bee, thinks the problem with California legislators is their “Let the people decide” attitude. In a recent op-​ed, Mr. Endicott argued that the initiative process allows politicians to shirk their responsibilities, to let decisions be made by voters at the ballot box. 

It’s an awfully convoluted notion: to make legislators actually do their jobs, citizens must back away and give those known to shirk their responsibilities a monopoly on legislative power.

Funny, in Congress and in the 26 states where voters lack the initiative, politicians happen to be shirking their responsibilities like it’s going out of style. There’s just not as much voters can do about it.

But Endicott’s argument doesn’t really concern legislators at all. It is about the voters of California, who have (to paraphrase him) ruined everything.

He writes: “Outcomes too often have been decided not by reasoned debate but by emotional appeals, mind-​numbing and misleading television commercials and direct mail, all of which do more to confuse than to enlighten.”

So Endicott looks for legislators to “crack down on signature gatherers” and “make it more difficult to qualify a measure.”

In other words, democracy was swell, but that new-​fangled TV is too much for gullible voters. Let’s hit the kill switch on direct democracy and put all our hope in our brainy, courageous legislators. 

In other words, Californians: Shut up and pay your taxes.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability too much government

Congress to Blame

Last week, the budget deal, with its first consequence: the immediate increase of U.S. government debt, to outsize the Gross Domestic Product. 

By week’s end, that notoriously rising debt was downgraded in the ratings.

Immediately, politicians began blaming each other.

In other words: No surprises.

Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Michele Bachmann both called for Timothy Geithner to resign. Sen. Paul argued that “Secretary Geithner assured everyone that raising the debt ceiling without a plan to balance the budget would not result in a downgrade to our debt.… He was clearly wrong. Our debt has been downgraded for the first time in history, and now American taxpayers will have to suffer the consequences.” Rep. Bachmann blamed the president first, then demanded Geithner’s walking papers.

Now, I hate to defend Geithner (he probably should resign), but the debt debacle is Congress’s fault. 

But such niceties of responsibility didn’t stop Move​-on​.org from setting up a Facebook campaign to impugn the Tea Party, blaming the Tea Party’s cussedness for the downgrade. 

Really? To focus only on the one political group actively trying to decrease the size of the debt demonstrates huge hunks of partisan chutzpah. By trying and failing to restrain spending, Tea Party folks only demonstrated Congress’s dedication to binge spending. The fault is in the binging, not in the feckless attempt at self-restraint.

Which is just what S & P considered: the company cited the wimpiness of the debt deal as the reason for the downgrade.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.