Category: too much government

Categories
general freedom too much government

Wait Until Next Year

Enjoy the Major League Baseball playoffs. Me? I’ll be crying in my beer. Except that I don’t even drink beer . . . it messes with my sinuses.

I had very high hopes that the Detroit Tigers would make it to the playoffs, perchance to the World Series. In first place in the Central Division throughout June, July, August and September, the Tigers tied for first at season’s end with the Minnesota Twins. So after 162 games, it took one more to anoint the division champion. That 163rd game went back and forth for twelve innings. But we lost.

Boo and hoo. Not everyone can be a winner. Except, maybe, in another sense.

The corporate-government complex that has taken over baseball and most of professional sports has milked billions from taxpayers. Everyone pays for stadiums even as players and owners rake in extraordinary rewards.

We could all win if this subsidy system were stopped. The fans, especially, could rejoice, savoring in good conscience the game’s important lessons: The ethic of always working your very hardest, doing your best, never giving up.

It’s entertainment and solid lessons about life that I can share, even now, with my kids. This summer we had the opportunity to travel to Detroit to see one game. And then, sitting on our couch, we watched on TV until the final pitch, hooping and hollering enough to make my wife shake her head.

After the game, we complained about missed calls and blind umpires, reminding ourselves that there’s always next year.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall too much government

Pension Tsunami

A humungous national debt. Growing state federal government budget deficits. Social Security and Medicare, running out of funds. All very frightening. But look out: The costs of public employee pensions are walloping city and state budgets — pushing a number of California cities into bankruptcy.

Though the stock market tumble hasn’t helped, the basic problem lies squarely with politicians. They like to increase future benefits to gain political support from public employee unions; they then underfund their lavish promises, the better to hide the fiscal reality from today’s taxpayers.

Politicians keep running from the problem, but a website called PensionTsunami.com won’t let them hide. The site, run by Californian Jack Dean, offers a steady stream of horror stories:

  • A new report calls the Kansas Public Employee Retirement System “bankrupt.”
  • A Rye, New York, city manager makes $198,000 a year while still collecting a pension for the same job.
  • The chief actuary for the California Public Employees Retirement System admits that current pension costs are “unsustainable.”

All across the country, politicians consistently fail to act. Californians are lucky: They have the voter initiative. The California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility, a group whose board includes Mr. Dean, is planning a statewide initiative to prevent their approaching tsunami.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Expensive Solutions

I’m skeptical of the notion that climate change is being driven by human activity . . . and thoroughly unconvinced that the planet will continue to warm causing catastrophic results.

But what if? If the globe is warming, what to do about it?

For starters, sell your beach house in Florida. Global warming means ice sheets melting, oceans rising, shoreline lost.

But for those of us without the beach house, what is the cost of global warming compared to the cost of fixing the problem?

Bjorn Lomborg, author of the book, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming, looked at this question and concluded that solving the problem of climate change is not cost-effective.

Lomborg is indeed concerned about warming and says that in an ideal world we’d “solve it.” But he says we have to set priorities, and that “[w]hat we can do about [global warming] is very little at a very high cost.”

In a Washington Post column, Lomborg warned that the damage done — especially to the world’s poor — by cutting carbon emissions will far outweigh the benefits. The estimated cost from projected climate damage is $1.1 trillion dollars. The projected expense of cutting enough emissions to avoid that damage is $46 trillion.

I’m skeptical about global warming. But spending $46 for every buck saved takes me well beyond skepticism. I’m against any such idiotic plan. If we must have catastrophe, I prefer the cheaper one.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

The Canadian Treatment

While President Obama flew to foreign lands to lobby for Chicago’s Olympic bid, a group of Americans trekked to Canada to find out about government-run health care.

Jon Caldara, president of the Independence Institute in Colorado, visited Vancouver, British Columbia, to host a conference that explored Canada’s medical system. Caldara’s foray north was written about in the Washington Times, and the Los Angeles Times interviewed some of the same Canadians.

Caldara’s interest in the subject is personal as well as civic-minded. He has a 5-year-old son who has undergone eight operations, including heart surgery. From what Caldara can tell, his son would have received little or none of this treatment in Canada. There, instead, he would have been put on waiting lists.

Caldara heard stories from Canadians who had been shuffled from one specialist to another, each requiring long waits before even being seen. Actual treatment? More waiting.

Outside the system, entrepreneurs have sprung up to broker deals with private physicians to the south, in the U.S., and even with growing quasi-illegal clinics in Canada.

Meanwhile, in our little haven for sick Canadians, American politicians still talk about reforms that would ruin it for the Canadians — as well as for us. Some even prefer the Canadian system to what we have now.

Jon Caldara doesn’t think this makes sense. Neither do I.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

A Regulatory Assault Taxis Into Law

When the politicians in our nation’s capital aren’t the butt of jokes for, say, not paying their taxes or behaving scandalously, well, they’re causing even more trouble.

One of their favorite areas of official mischief-making is assaulting — er, regulating — the city’s taxicabs. Last week a number of cabbies went on strike, protesting a proposed system, not dissimilar to New York’s taxi regime. The new scheme would require cab owners to buy a very expensive medallion to operate each cab.

Larry Frankel, one of the strikers quoted in the Washington Post, said, “We are here to protect our rights as owners and operators.”

The protesting cabbies object that this is not just another expensive regulation. This one threatens their very livelihoods. It’s almost designed to favor large companies over driver-owned cabs.

Which seems almost universally the case with regulations: They protect big interests from competition.

District Council member Jim Graham, who introduced the bill to “medallionize” taxicabs, said he feared the city would be “overrun” with taxis. There are 8,000 already, with 300 adding on every month.

Why, some day there could be more cabs than politicians and lobbyists combined! Imagine the disaster: Folks getting across town too easily or, worse yet, too inexpensively.

Just another bit of ill-thought-out regulation. It is par for the course in our nation’s capital. It makes you proud to . . . live somewhere else.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

News Flash: After this commentary was recorded, the FBI arrested a top aide to DC City Councilman Jim Graham on charges of accepting cash bribes and free trips in exchange for pushing the taxicab legislation discussed here. (See this news coverage and this article in the Washington Post.)

Categories
too much government

American Opinion versus the Political Mandate

American politics is often dominated by a myth, the myth of the “mandate.”

Mandates, it is said, come from winning elections. The word used to be applied to big wins. Now that’s been watered down.

But elections do not a mandate make.

The recent shift from united government under the Republicans to united government under the Democrats has been dubbed a mandate, a mandate for “change” — which, in the programs of President Barack Obama and his powerful allies in Congress, seems to mean “more government.” Lots more.

Meanwhile, the American people hold different notions. A recent Gallup poll shows that 57 percent of Americans think that government is doing too much. Only 38 percent of respondents to the poll thought that government should do more. And regarding business and industry? Twenty-four percent thought government did too little; 45 percent thought government regulates business too heavily as it is.

According to most Americans, there’s too much government overall.

So how does this square with the picture provided by major media, and emphasized on the left? Not very well. Democrats came into the recent situation thinking they had a mandate. They were wrong.

What Democrats had was a win from Americans repudiating the Republicans for general incompetence, and for (yes) growing government too much. If Democrats continue their government growth agenda, the mirage they see as a mandate will completely vanish.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights too much government

The First Casualty of Health Care Reform

The first casualty of war is truth. The first casualty of health care reform? Free speech.

While most health care insurers have gone along with reform proposals, even helping write the bills, a few insurance companies fall outside the insiders’ perimeter, fearful of more regulation. The regulatory environment is already oppressive, after all — though, for the insurance industry these regs come mainly from the states.

So, we now learn, at least one medical insurance provider, Humana, sent out a special letter to policyholders who also participate in the Medicare Advantage program, advising them of what the effects of new reforms on their coverage would likely be.

What happened next?

If you guessed “gag order,” you got it.

After Humana’s expression of First Amendment rights, the Department of Health and Human Services told all insurers participating in Medicare Advantage to zip it, stifle themselves, express their thoughts in no way about any proposed reform to their policyholders — even if all such expression amounts to is a list of facts.

Penalties include both fines and jail time.

Yes, folks, this is what unlimited government means. Increase government’s role and “hasta la vista” to some very basic freedoms.

Just as government micromanagement of markets leads to shortages and rising prices, so increased government has predictable consequences. We pay for big government in lost freedom as well as dollars.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights property rights too much government

California Crackdowns

A government agency practicing extortion . . . who’d’a thunk it?

In 1987, the California Coastal Commission lost a Supreme Court case about its attempt to demand beach access from property owners in exchange for building permits. One justice said it was practicing extortion.

Nevertheless, the agency still dictates what land owners must do to receive permits — which are required even to move piles of dirt around. In one instance, the unelected Commission ordered that most of an owner’s land be given over to farming. The Pacific Legal Foundation is fighting this insanity in court.

Richard Oshen decided to produce a documentary about the CCC after friends told him how it was interfering with their own property. The agency had even gone so far as to prohibit them from tape recording its inspection of their land.

Oshen spent years conducting interviews. He even managed to film a conversation with CCC head Peter Douglas in which Douglas downplayed the agency’s dictatorial powers. But Reason magazine reports that Douglas now wants to revoke the permission he gave to use that interview. He’s also demanding to see a pre-release version of the movie — either to try to prevent its release or just on general principles of harassing critics of tyranny.

I’ve reported on the commission before. It behaves as a kind of environmentalist mafia operating under color of law — and clearly the CCC is no fan of free speech.

Let’s hope that Douglas fails, Oshen succeeds, and California land owners get a reprieve.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability national politics & policies too much government

Drop Out of the Bucket

Does $40.3 million seem like a lot of money to you? It does to me.

But to the Social Security Administration? It’s a drop in the bucket.

Or, a drop out of the bucket.

You see, while the federal government is scheduled to soon reinstate the estate tax on the wealth of deceased people, we now learn that it has also been giving money to the dearly departed.

Yes, an internal audit of the Social Security Administration revealed that it paid out more than $40 million to over six thousand dead people.

These benefits were given out weeks, months, years after receiving death certificates. The bureaucracy had been duly notified. And yet it went blithely on, continuing to send monthly checks.

Bureaucratic error. Hey, we all make mistakes. But it’s worth noting that this was an internal audit. Who knows what we’d catch if it were an external audit, with teeth?

Lately, the federal government has been talking over car companies and banks. Now the president and Congress plan to take control of the medical sector of our economy. They tell us they’ll cut medical costs by cutting waste. Yeah, right.

On a cheerier note, we needn’t fear the institution of those so-called “death panels” to cut costs. The way the feds work, there’d be no savings — they’d still be paying for care long after the patients were dead and gone.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

Over 50 and for Freedom

Say you’re a senior citizen. You’re concerned about the rising costs of medical services, but are not ready to surrender your care to well-meaning but naive advocates of ever-greater government. What to do?

Many seniors belong to AARP, a kind of combination consumer group and political lobbyist association for people age 50 and over. Fifty seems kind of youngish to me to be a senior citi — ow! crick in my back! — but okay.

Members get discounts and also get AARP spokesmen pretending to represent them on political questions. AARP supports a big-government overhaul of medical services. However, they’ve discovered that the issue is touchy. So they have taken pains to dispute President Obama’s recent claim that AARP endorses any particular bill.

Some AARP members fear that Medicare benefits are at risk. Other AARP members and former members just like their freedom.

Thank goodness AARP has competition. There’s a group called 60 Plus, and now a new outfit, the American Seniors Association, is offering a special deal to all seniors who submits a torn-up AARP card with their application.

ASA’s president, Stuart Barton, is blunt: “President Obama must think the American people are idiots. . . .” if he thinks they’ll buy “the idea that health care rationing, restrictions and regulations being debated in Congress will save money and result in better preventative medicine.”

You know what? I’m not even going to wait until I turn fifty. Sign me up.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.