Author: Redactor

Categories
ideological culture tax policy

The Audacity of Sleep

During Wednesday’s big speech, just as President Obama laid into Rep. Ryan’s Medicare reform proposal, Vice President Joe Biden skirmished with the Sandman. Zzzzz.

Obama wasn’t boring, though. He had a theme.

As he saw it, the Republicans’ “pessimistic” vision is of an “America [that] can’t afford to keep the promise we’ve made for our seniors” or “invest in education or clean energy” or fix “our roads” or afford to do all the cool things done by South Korea, Brazil, and China.

He didn’t explain how it might have come to pass that our government became disabled. He barely mentioned previous budgets’ waste — on goofy projects, overpayments, duplicated efforts, and undeclared, never-​ending wars. Or how government regulation and subsidy might be the reason many people cannot afford medical insurance.

Or that if the government doesn’t invest in something, it doesn’t mean that private investors aren’t investing.

But he did mention his opposition to “more than $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy.”

And then came the corker: “In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90 percent of all working Americans actually declined. The top 1 percent saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each.  And that’s who needs to pay less taxes?”

Wow. America’s wealthiest merely “saw their incomes rise”? They didn’t actually do something for their gains?

Maybe Obama was napping while others were working.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
too much government

Moolah for Media

Has Congress rescinded the Obamacare yet? No?

Bad news if you favor free-​market medicine. Nifty news if you’re a doddering corporate dinosaur of old media — like the Washington Post and CBS New and NBC News — with millions, or billions, in the kitty. And zero compunction about holding out a tin cup for funds extracted from taxpayers.

The Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon alerts us to the emergency resuscitation these institutions are receiving from Obamacare’s “Early Retiree Reinsurance Program.” The Post got $570,000 in extracted-​from-​taxpayers payoffs (some critics call ERRP a “slush fund”); CBS got $720,000; and General Electric, one of the owners of NBC Universal, got $37 million. Verizon, AT&T and sundry labor unions are also snatching up the subsidies.

There’s $5 billion allotted to this Obamacare slush fund for early retirees, which is not supposed to run out until 2014. But almost $2 billion have been distributed to corporations already. (To be fair, everybody knows that early projections of the long-​run costs of wondrous new government programs tend to be conservative, understated, modest, even bashful.)

Cannon and others argue that when reporting on Obamacare, journalists at such outfits should disclose that their employers have received the massive subsidies. Let viewers know about the bribes so that they can better evaluate the pro-​interventionist spin typical in these venues. 

Fine. But I have an even better suggestion for the wealthy corporate mendicants: Don’t take the cash to begin with.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture individual achievement

Atlas Screened

John Galt had it right in Atlas Shrugged when, stepping to one side so that the whole world could see the gun being pointed at him, he told the politicians and bureaucrats: “Get the hell out of my way!”

Want markets to work? Leave markets alone. Leave people alone.

In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, Rand’s perennial bestseller has been selling even better. Now sales of the apocalyptic fable are about to jump again. After 18 years trying to bring a studio on board, rights holder John Aglialoro decided to produce the movie himself.

He made that decision in April last year. Filming began two months later, just before his option would have expired.

“I have been an entrepreneur with companies in different industries — from airlines to health care, oil services, and exercise equipment — and I have had to deal with government in every one, at every step of the way,” says Aglialoro. “It’s a constant drain of time and energy. We could be in the 24th century today, in terms of technology, innovation, and wealth if it were not for all the controls.…

“Atlas Shrugged is my fortification against all that. It’s a liberation of the human spirit. That’s what I get from making the movie. And that’s what I want people to get from watching it.”

The movie hits theaters April 15, 2011. Catch the trailer online. And a scene.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

Give Me Fever

Today, the U.S. Conference of Mayors premiers its new video, “Recall Fever: Stop the Madness,” at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The video is part of a “public awareness initiative” to convince folks that recalling their mayor is “destructive” and “costly.”

“This archaic rule,” said U.S. Conference of Mayors chief executive Tom Cochran recently, “is being put to sinister use.”

But just how sinister was it when 69 percent of Ogden, Kansas, voters recalled their mayor last year? What would you do were you to discover, after the election, that your mayor had served more than a decade in neighboring state prisons for burglary, aggravated assault and involuntary manslaughter?

The 88 percent of Miami/​Dade, Florida, voters who unseated their mayor last month don’t seem sinister, either — his self-​dealing and cronyism, on the other hand, surely qualify.

Though the anti-​recall event doesn’t feature any mayor who has actually been removed from office through recall, more sensible testimony can be found from the ranks of the ousted: Carmen Kontur-​Gronquist of Arlington, Oregon. After online pictures of her posing scantily clad on a city fire truck created a firestorm, voters recalled her by a mere three-​vote margin. Still, her reaction was philosophic: “[T]he democratic process took place, and that is a good process that we have in the United States, and it’s fair.”

Maybe Cochran and his cabal of mayors should keep their shirts on … so to speak. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture media and media people

How the Worm Turns

Some folks wait till the last moment to decide how to vote. And when indifference was the mental state right before the decision, we can’t help but wonder what moved the person from indecision to selection. A coin toss?

Or something more insidious? 

This kind of worry lies behind a mini-​controversy over a CNN News feature. For the 2008 presidential campaign CNN gathered 32 undecided voters and gave them knobs to turn as they listened to candidates’ speeches. Turn the knob one way for approval, the opposite for disapproval. A computer averaged out the responses, and graphed them in real time underneath the TV image of the candidate speaking. 

Such graphic elements of newscasts have been called “worms.”

Psychologists have studied this sort of thing, and suspect that the mere presentation of this average approval rating amounts to “spin.”

And, as such, constitutes undue influence of a small group, perhaps easily manipulable, over a large group of voters. 

British psychologists studying CNN-​like worms say they accumulated data of measurable signs of influence. “The responses of a small group of individuals could, via the worm, influence millions of voters,” the scientists write. They also declare this effect “not conducive to a healthy democracy.”

Yes, yes, but “peer pressure” has been a known element of democracy for some time.

Only the worms are new. 

And, in their context, they provide more information. As with speech we may not like, more and different worm varieties (on different networks, perhaps) is undoubtedly the best response.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies

Blame for the Shutdown

A fascinating short account of what a “government shutdown” means, courtesy of the BBC, wraps up in an odd way: “If the U.S. government shuts down after 8 April, it will mostly be because Republicans believe that the government is too costly and inefficient.”

Really?

It’s not because Congress can’t balance budgets? It’s not because last year’s Democratic-​controlled Congress couldn’t even cook up an unbalanced budget, instead relying on a series of makeshift “continuing resolutions”?

Why blame Republicans’ general view of government services, and not the political process described at the beginning of the report?

Well, the BBC’s Katie Connolly was stretching the truth so to get to a series of “ironies.” Government shutdowns are expensive, she writes. Inefficient.

Sure, sure. But if the government does indeed shut down because of a budget impasse, I don’t see that the “irony” of a shutdown accrues as blame only to Republicans.

Indeed, it seems a bit like flailing around, looking for usual suspects — not real culprits.

But if you want a reach.… 

Politicians often pay homage to John Maynard Keynes to excuse their spending far over revenue. Stimulus and all that. Keynesianism: Politicians love it, because they love to over-spend.

But Keynes also said that governments should run at surplus during good times. Somehow the Rs and Ds in Washington never bring that up.

So blame the Ks. 

The Keynesians allowed the misuse of their master’s nostrums, which put us where we are today. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.