Category: too much government

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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Has Congress rescinded the Obamacare yet?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.

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national politics & policies responsibility too much government

The Trademark of Irresponsible Politicians

Who doesn’t agree with President Obama? “We simply cannot continue to spend as if deficits don’t have consequences,” he said when introducing his budget in February.

But who believes he’s serious? He went on to say that we must not treat “the hard-earned tax money of the American people . . . like Monopoly money.” Yet, by spending at hyper-deficit levels and offering no reasonable plan to balance the budget, he demonstrates a preference to play Monopoly™, not Responsibility®.

Now, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan has a plan. He spelled it out Tuesday, giving it a hopeful moniker, “The Path to Prosperity.”

“Prosperity’s Around the Corner” was already taken in the noösphere.

The most salient feature of the plan, though, is that it designed to take its own sweet time. The budget wouldn’t balance next year. Or the year after. Or even in five, like Sen. Rand Paul’s much better plan.

Besides, today’s Congress can’t control itself must less control future Congresses. That’s the trouble with all these procrastinating plans.

Remember, even Rand Paul thinks his plan takes too long and doesn’t go far enough.

Of course, Obama dislikes Ryan’s plan. The new White House press secretary offers, “The President believes there is a more balanced way to put America on a path to prosperity.”

But he won’t share it with us. Obama and congressional Democrats are playing the oldest game in the book: All talk but no responsibility.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

America’s Dirty Nuclear Secret

Before Cherynobl, we could sort of dismiss nuclear power’s danger. Afterwards, we could still say “Well, that’s the Soviets, for you.”

Now, with the ongoing Fukushima Dai-ichi disaster, the extent of what can go wrong is becoming horrifically clear, especially now that it looks like merely gaining control of the worst-off reactor could take months, not days.

It rightly makes us worry about the whole industry.

It’s a pity, too, because nuclear power concentrates its costs (spent fuel in containers) while providing enormous marketable benefits. Burning coal, on the other hand, disperses its “costs” in the form of pollution. Nuclear power would seem to be a perfect market solution.

But a “meltdown” — or just losing control of a fission process — concentrates harms in a manner hard to ignore or justify.

We hear that new nuclear tech is in development, and might become quite safe. But the promised extra-safe variety is not yet online anywhere, yet.

Why?

Could it be because government protects the currently unsafe technology? America’s nuclear power is protected from the rigors of risk as assessed by the cold, calculating insurance industry under 1957’s Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act, which shifts risk from investors to taxpayers in case of catastrophe.

Perhaps if that were repealed, better nuclear tech would emerge faster.

As it is, our old nuclear tech awaits a rare convergence of disastrous factors, like a major earthquake plus human error, or terrorism plus x.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights too much government

Ohio’s Stomp-Speech Commission

The Ohio Elections Commission takes sides in campaign debates and can penalize those they disagree with.

The Commission issues rulings not about obvious libel or slander, but differing interpretations. Disagreements. Their authority derives from a decades-old election law outlawing “false statements” in election campaigns. A new court fight challenging the law may finally end this speech-squelching travesty.

Attorney James Bopp is fighting a defamation suit by a defeated candidate. This losing candidate snagged a favorable ruling from the Commission, preventing billboards critical of him from going up, but still wants a pound of flesh. Bopp observes that Ohio’s law against “false statements” is merely an unconstitutional weapon “that can be deployed during any election to try to stifle speech.”

Chris Finney, another lawyer who has represented clients suffering the OEC’s censorious attention, says what the Commission typically deals with “has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of the statement in question [but with] trying to embarrass your opponent as Election Day approaches. You get a headline that says this person is a liar.”

Opposing conclusions can both be “right” . . . given contradictory interpretations of the same facts. The First Amendment is supposed to safeguard open debate about such disagreements — not extinguish it.

Would defenders of Ohio’s law cheer if editorial writers were routinely hauled before speech boards to defend the accuracy of their political assessments?

It’s a disgrace that Ohio’s false-statement law has been in effect for even one day, let alone decades.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
folly free trade & free markets national politics & policies Tenth Amendment federalism too much government

Derailing Washington’s Train Fixation

The great age of trains — the 19th century — spawned a few amazing political careers, not excluding the railway lawyer, Abraham Lincoln. Many major railroads depended on moving politicians first, earth and iron second.

More than ever, today’s passenger rail lines are creatures of the state. Amtrak loses money, and could only be successful as a private operation were politicians able to let its unprofitable lines go.

Congress insists, instead, on putting up more money-losing railways in as many places as possible. President Obama even tried to get a bullet train put through between Tampa and Orlando, despite the fact that the two Florida cities were too close to each other for a super-fast train to make any sense.

Worse for the bullet was the politics.

In 2000, Floridians had voted in high-speed monorail; in 2004, they voted in greater numbers to kill their own project. Voters realized that, with politicians in charge, railroad projects tended to go runaway.

Perhaps that helped convince Rick Scott, the new governor, to reject the federal government’s offer to pay $2.4 billion of a $2.6 billion bullet train. The billions of “free money” that the Obama Administration promised began to seem, well, costly.

So, of course, the federal government sued. In early March, a Florida court ruled that the governor did indeed have the power to tell the feds to play with trains elsewhere.

A minor victory for railway sanity. A major victory for federalism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

National Public Railroadeo

The controversy about all the elitist condescension galloping through the halls and programming policies of National Public Radio are both on point and beside the point. Even if NPR’s appeal were universal, it is not the proper function of government to be funding and controlling media.

Just the same, NPR’s appeal is far from universal. It serves not “the public,” but a slice of it — about 11 percent, according to Sue Schardt, member of an NPR distribution committee. She concedes that those who built NPR “unwittingly cultivated a core audience that is predominantly white, liberal, highly educated, elite” but stipulates that it was “never anyone’s intention to exclude anyone.”

True, but not meaningful. Coca Cola would love to get all the Pepsi people, Mother Jones would love to get all the National Review people, plus Esquire and New Yorker people, plus CBS and NBC and ABC people. But every successful enterprise must target its product.

Schardt believes that the way to answer political challenges to NPR’s funding is to expand the base with a broader appeal. The 30-year incubation period is over, now let’s be all we can be! Prove the nay-sayers wrong!

Fine with me if NPR tries this — or any other audience-building strategy. Just not on my dime. NPR would probably do best preaching to the liberal choir as they’ve always done. But, again, in the marketplace. Don’t make the rest of us pay for it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

Life, the Universe, and Everything

The answer is 42.

The question? Not Douglas Adams’s Ultimate Question concerning “life, the universe, and everything.” Instead, it’s the answer to the question, “How many mandates does the State of Oregon place on the medical insurance packages Oregonians are allowed to buy?”

Forty-two.

The number is far too large — and yet the number will likely increase this year, courtesy of the state legislature, despite the fact that the current mandates raise the cost of medical insurance for Oregonians.

Steve Buckstein, speaking before the state’s House Committee on Health Care, for-instanced Iowa, which sports 16 fewer mandates. The state has lower percentages of uninsured folks and lower premiums than in states with higher numbers of required services.

Buckstein, a policy analyst for Cascade Policy Institute, was arguing for HB 2977, which would allow Oregonians to purchase medical insurance from other states. This would add competition to the current highly over-regulated market.

Buckstein shouldn’t have to do this. The purpose of the federal union was to create a vast free trade zone. Misguided state mandates such as the ones he’s fighting rest upon prohibiting state citizens from buying outside the state, which runs up against the grain of the Constitution. For too long Congress has exempted the medical insurance industry from the correct application of the Commerce Clause, leading to a crippled industry and opening the way for disastrously unworkable ideas like, well, “Obamacare.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

Stop the Mortgage Madness

The New York Times wonders how “home buying [might] change if the federal government shuts down the housing finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.” Despite vague agreement that misguided government policy somehow encouraged short-sighted, irresponsible conduct, many want government to keep it up.

It’s supposedly “well understood” that Fanny and Freddie “misused” government’s support to back “millions of shoddy loans.” Shoddy how? Shoddy because awarded to high-risk debtors on terms impossible without the government’s easy credit, subsidies, regulations, exhortations and bailout net. Many of the loans would not have been made by creditors obliged to consider not only potential profits but also all the actual and potential costs, without government interference.

In the article’s very next paragraph, however, we learn that although the consequences of “misused” government support for untenable loans are now “well understood,” there’s a “much more divisive question” now in play: “whether the government should preserve the benefits that the companies provide to middle-class borrowers, including lower interest rates, lenient terms and the ability to get a mortgage even when banks are not making other kinds of loans.”

Huh? You mean, many politicians and beneficiaries of government largesse are “divided” over whether a policy of destructively encouraging irresponsible conduct should be clung to with only cosmetic, if any, changes — even though this policy sank the economy?

Scavengers picking carcasses may not care about the long run. But the rest of us should.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Unkinder Cuts

The Republicans’ proposed cuts to the federal budget are called “deep” in Washington. So deep that Democrat Sen. John Kerry called them terrible, and Illinois Senator Dick Durbin protests that “Republicans are unfairly and unwisely placing the burden of spending cuts on domestic programs. Durbin tells Fox News Sunday he’s ‘willing to see more deficit reduction, but not out of domestic discretionary spending.’”

The Democrats have offered, instead, a shallower set of cuts, of $6.5 billion from domestic spending, hardly a tenth of what the Republicans offer.

But what the Republicans offer is only 5 percent of the budget deficit. Not the budget, mind you, just the Godzilla-sized deficit.

I’m curious where Durbin wants to cut. He’s offered no reduction in domestic “mandatory spending,” which is made up chiefly of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on the debt. Barring repudiating the debt, where would he attack the budget?

That leaves one huge hunk open for paring down: war spending. But realize that shutting down our entire military, zeroing it out, wouldn’t completely close this deficit. To make substantial Defense Department cuts, we’d have to extricate ourselves from wars abroad or pull our troops out of Europe and Japan and Korea, etc. All things I think we can, should and must do.

Talk is cheap, and awfully vague. “A terrible idea”; “unfairly and unwisely” . . . as if our current budget mess wasn’t the result of a thousand terrible ideas . . . and unfair and unwise spending galore.

The Republicans’ proposed cuts are disappointing. The Democrats’ objections? Witless.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Fine-Tuning the Shackles

Loathe handcuffs and leg irons? No problem. We’ll adjust the restraints slightly. Shave a gram off the weight. Paint them a new color. And throw away the key.

Feel liberated?

Nobody in a chain gang would be fooled.

But the Obama Administration expects phony “concessions” in the implementation of last year’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare,” for short) to be treated as a sign of generous and reasonable compromise. The president supports an amendment to the health care law that, according to the New York Times, would “allow states to opt out of its most burdensome requirements three years earlier than currently permitted.”

If you dislike the program’s taxes and mandates, which after all constitute Obamacare’s most burdensome requirements, you’d approve. Right? All we need do is move in 2014 to some state that has opted out . . .

Not so fast. The state programs would have to cover just as many people and be just as “comprehensive and affordable” as the federal program. How to do this except by forcing people to participate?

The amended legislation would also allow states to establish single-payer systems in which the state government is the only insurer of health care. Compromise?

As Michael Cannon observes, “President Obama’s move is not about giving states more flexibility. It’s about moving the nation even faster toward his ideal of a Canadian- or British-style single-payer health-care system.” Which is where Obama and many Democrats have been hankering to go all along.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.