Category: too much government

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Accountability local leaders too much government

Ed Koch’s Friends and Enemies

Ed Koch has an enemies list. He also has a friends list.

Now in his mid-​80s, the former New York City mayor has emerged from political retirement to take arms against the sea of troubles flowing from the dysfunctional New York State legislature.

A few months back, the octogenarian citizen activist founded New York Uprising, which asks lawmakers to sign three pledges committing themselves to major political reform. One pledge focuses on toughening up ethics regulations, another on reforming the state’s budget process, a third on putting an end to gerrymandering.

Any state lawmaker who fails to sign is, to Koch, a “bum”: “Throw the bums out!” is the electoral fate for non-​signers and pledge-​breakers that he enjoins upon New Yorkers. Reviewing the details of the pledges, I’m not sure that if I were a candidate I’d endorse every provision myself. Maybe I’d sign two out of the three pledges, or something. And I wish Koch were promoting state legislative term limits and voter initiative and referendum as well.

So far, 91 lawmakers have signed on, 210 have declined. But the campaign has been getting decent coverage in the media, including a recent article in the New York Times. One thin-​skinned assemblywoman threatened to sue in response to being called an “enemy of reform,” which is the kind of publicity you can’t buy.

Reforming Albany was never going to be easy. But the iron is hot. Good luck, Mr. Koch.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


Categories
national politics & policies too much government

The Bill With No Name

It’s not legislation out of a Clint Eastwood western. It’s a congressional bill with the somewhat sketchy cognomen of the “_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​ Act of ________.”

This non-​name may also front the law as eventually foisted. The Senate is in recess until September, so there might not be a chance to correct the title in both houses. To be signed into law, a bill must pass both chambers in identical form.

WashingtonWatch​.com reports that HR1586 would “impose an additional tax on bonuses received from certain TARP recipients” — referring to the controversial Troubled Asset Relief Program, the $700 billion bailout program of October 2008. But the nameless bill has morphed somewhat. As Jim Harper of the Cato Institute observes, it was “introduced as one thing (TARP taxes), became another thing (an aviation bill), and is now a batch of spending policies.”

Maybe it should be called the Still More of Your Money Down the Drain Act.

Merits of this $26 billion bill aside, there’s the hardly incidental question of why. The title of the Bill with No Name is the exception that symbolizes the rule, i.e. that bill-​passage is typically a rush job even when bills are thousands of pages long.

We know that many politicians want to run every aspect of our lives. Apparently it scarcely matters to them how they go about it, just slap together greater restrictions on our liberty combined with grand authorizations to spend additional billions and call it a law.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

Move On to the Poverty Line

According to a recent email bulletin from Daniel Mintz of MoveOn​.org, Republicans and running-​dog Democrats are gearing up to “slash” Social Security benefits.

The tone of the bulletin? Strident hysteria. How can anyone even think of such a thing in hard times like these, when “no jobs bill can pass congress”? 

Well, we’ve had stimulus bills up to our nostrils, but hope of “recovery” remains just that, mere hope. Mintz, who denies that Social Security is in anything like a crisis, ignores the devastation to the system caused by its Ponzi nature, Congress’s longtime plundering of the program, and the current depression.

He wants you to sign a pledge for no cuts and no raise in the retirement age. He says it would easy to “strengthen” the program by “making the rich pay their fair share.” 

Of course, the effect of raising the maximum FICA payment (their “fair share”) without correspondingly increasing benefits to those who pay extra (no one’s proposing that!) would turn Social Security into a blatant welfare redistribution program. All ties to investment? Severed. 

Further, it would signal politicians that their sins can always be covered over with a tax.

Worse yet, it would soak up huge hunks of wealth from those who do the most investing and turn a pension system — ideally a huge source of capital — into one humungous capital drain. 

Making us all poorer. MoveOn​-to​-the​-poverty​-line​.org.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Metro Plays Hooky Roulette

Government-​run mass transit is not merely a tragedy of inefficiency, in Washington, DC, the Metro has proved itself a danger to life and limb.

Five Metro workers have been killed on the job in roughly the last year. Before that, a June 2009 Metro train accident that killed nine people and injured seventy more. In a June 27 Townhall​.com column, I lamented that even after all these deadly accidents, the National Transportation Safety Board complained there remain “significant deficiencies in their safety culture.”

Now, thanks to a Washington Examiner report we find out that Metro’s deficiencies start right at the top. During the last 18 months, six of Metro’s 14 appointed board members have no-​showed for at least 20 percent of the meetings.

Vice Chairman Marcell Solomon, the board’s highest paid member, missed over half the meetings. Of course, D.C. Councilman Michael Brown was worse, skipping out on two-​thirds of the meetings in the same 18-​month period.

If this were a private business it would be going belly up from paying out large settlements for the death and destruction it has wrecked across the region, or shut down for gross mismanagement equal to gross negligence.

But Councilman Brown says he’s improved this year, only missing half the meetings. “My attendance hasn’t been great,” Brown concedes, “but my engagement has always been there.”

Metro trains keep rolling dangerously down the tracks with a politicized management that is asleep at the switch.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
too much government

Who “YouTubes” You, and Why

Government agencies now store nude pictures of you.

Well, if you travel on the major airlines out of some major airports, they do.

When the Transportation Security Administration began using full-​body scanning at select airports — with devices such as the backscatter X‑ray machine, which can show every lovely and unlovely fold (if not freckle) on your body — officials rushed to defend their practice of peering at us under our clothing. It was only for our safety. Besides, the images were made only for immediate viewing. They weren’t even stored. 

Why, they couldn’t be stored!

We learned this week how wrong that was. The U.S. Marshals Service has been secretly storing thousands and thousands of the images. Furthermore, specifications for some devices even require that they send the images over networks.

Once again, government folk have lied to us.

There’s no evidence that anyone’s been blackmailed based on the images. But you have to think of privacy dangers in the fourth dimension, time. Can we trust people in future governments with our intimate details as unforeseen crises come to the fore? As new personnel gain access to the archives? As tomorrow’s politicians pledge (and routinely break) their oaths of office?

We wear clothing to select who will see us naked. Taking that prerogative away, in the name of security, and giving it to people we do not know?

That’s transparently foolish. And unsafe.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
folly free trade & free markets too much government

The Alternative to the Public Option

The congressional “progressive” caucus still wants to impose a public health insurance option, allegedly to “reduce the deficit.”

According to caucus kingpin Raul Grijalva, deficit hawks are “hypocrites” for predicting that government spending would balloon were a public option imposed. Their “excuse … that it was going to be too expensive is phony,” according to Congressman Grijalva.

The progressives’ notion seems to be that accelerating the pell-​mell government takeover of the medical delivery industry is the very best thing one could do to reduce the deficit.

If that’s the case, then why not also “reduce the deficit” with respect to other sectors of the economy in which government spends any money at all — that is, in any economic sector — by launching a government takeover that eventually swamps private markets altogether? 

By “progressive” logic, communizing the whole economy must be the best way to foster fiscal sobriety in DC. 

Absurd, I know.

Perhaps Grijalva’s deceived by his franking privilege. The public option for postal delivery works so well. For him. For the rest of us, we have to pay the billions the USPS loses every year.

The solution to the USPS’s constant, persistent failure is not to regulate and nationalize Fed-​Ex and UPS and every other alternative. 

Real progress requires the opposite of Grijalva’s “progressivism”: Pry government out of both health care and postal delivery. This is not a radical idea. It is only … well …

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.