Category: too much government

Categories
education and schooling too much government

Just What We Need

Why is schooling so expensive? Government makes it so.

Take the recent example, in California, of “coder boot camps.” These are “schools” where computer coders receive training. We now learn that the Golden State’s education bureaucrats are cracking down on this unlicensed and unregulated form of learning.

Unless they comply, these organizations face imminent closure and a hefty $50,000 fine. These organizations have two weeks to start coming into compliance.

In mid-January, the Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education (BPPE) sent cease and desist letters to Hackbright Academy, Hack Reactor, App Academy, Zipfian Academy, and others.

The regulators insist that these private enterprises fall under their regulatory domain, and they are going to do their job, dangit, even if it helps . . . no one.

Reaction from the coder academy heads has been boilerplate. They’ve attested to their will to co-operate with regulators, but worry that current regulations do not really have much to do with what they are up to.

Hey, regulators, rather than shut these academies down, or cook up new regs, why not just let the operations go on as before?

Worried about quality control in a consumer-protection sense? Then make one requirement: The schools should notify paying students that the academy’s services and education contracts are unregulated by the state. Make do, students, with caveat emptor, as before. That is, by the principles of market supply and demand, and undergirding laws against fraud.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall judiciary local leaders too much government

Moving Boulders

“Supreme Court says Boulder City cannot sue citizens over ballot initiatives,” read the Las Vegas Sun headline.

An important legal victory . . . a long time coming.

Three years ago, I caught an online story about a citizens group that had petitioned three measures onto their local ballot: (1) require voter approval before the city council could incur $1 million or more in debt, (2) term limits for members on city commissions and committees, and (3) restrict the city to just one publicly-owned golf course.

Their public spirit was promptly rewarded by being sued, personally, and dragged into court by the city attorney of Boulder City.

I called the citizens’ attorney quoted in the news story, Linda Strickland, and we talked for over an hour. This case, as the Nevada Supreme Court has now agreed, is a classic violation of the state’s Anti-SLAPP statute (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation).

Citizens in Charge Foundation gave Linda and Terry, her husband and law partner, the John Lilburne Award, affording this small town legal scuffle some national recognition and sparking news coverage across Nevada.

On a later trip, I sat in Linda’s living room with a dozen local citizens who recounted the good feeling of participating in the petition campaign and then their unease of being sued by their own city government. I couldn’t be more pleased to now relate that Linda’s efforts have paid off in a state Supreme Court win, protecting the rights of all Nevadans to petition their government.

Freedom is regularly attacked and must be defended. Thanks to Linda and others, it shall be.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

The State of the Union of the States

Politicians know all about lying with statistics. But it’s more effective to lie with anecdotes — using stories to ignore the biggest Statistic in the Room.

President Barack Obama delivered his constitutionally obligatory State of the Union address to Congress last night. He told a lot of stories, and most of them may have been mostly true, for all I know. But what we do know for sure is that these stories distracted us from the one statistic that matters.

You know, to the actual state of the union.

Which is not sound.

The rising level of debt is putting the finances of the union in grave jeopardy. Politicians have promised too much — delivered too much — courtesy of borrowing from future tax revenues. The current debt is larger than the nation’s annual GDP. (That’s the stat that matters.) The federal government owes more than all of us, together, earn in a year.

This, of course, is unsustainable.

And yet the president is doing precious little to curb this unhappy meeting with destiny. Deficits are down a tad. He took credit for that. He didn’t credit the Republicans, his recalcitrant enemies.

But, in a State of the Union address filled with programs to expand and goals to “guarantee,” he didn’t offer to cut anything, did he? (Other than promise, yet again, to close Guantanamo.)

Indeed, in Obama’s most recent bickering “negotiation” with the House had his bid for extending unemployment benefits met with an ask price of an offsetting cut elsewhere in the budget. The prez balked.

Our “state”? In a deep debt hole, oblivious, and still digging.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Grasping for a Legacy

Rush Limbaugh recently characterized United States President Barack Obama as a narcissist — and not for the first time.

On the surface, Limbaugh’s complaint about presidential narcissism seems ludicrous: people are thinking about the president “all the time” — the man is in the position to be contemplated by millions every hour, every minute. He’s thought about in Arkansas and Zimbabwe, Alaska and Kenya, Washington, D.C., and every potential drone target in the mid-East.

So, whatever existential crisis runs through the president’s brain should worry us, too. This isn’t narcissism. Or messianism. It’s simply the position of power he’s in, and the position of null-power we’re in.

Nick Gillespie, at Reason, thinks that the prez is going through a major crisis of self-confidence. As nearly everything around Obama has turned to lead, his personal charm has shown to be something less than alchemical. He may be golden tongued, but nothing he touches upgrades to noble. The prez understandably would want a legacy, and Obamacare ain’t going to be it.

Gillespie suggests that Obama begin to end the war on marijuana. That would be a legacy!

And it would. Alas, Obama may have had some inclination to do this earlier, but likely feared that, just as it was Nixon who had to go to China, it would be best if someone other than an admitted former toker begin the legalization of drugs.

Too bad. Now’s the time.

Though neither Rush nor Nick nor I know the president’s heart, this seems certain: Obama rests most of his hopes for change on massive government programs, not on the repeal of programs. Wrong direction for a progressive!

But the right — responsible — direction for America.

Let’s hope “narcissism” trumps ideology.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
too much government

Oops! Goes Washington

One hundred billion dollars isn’t chump change.

That’s the official amount of overpayments not recovered made by the federal government. According to the Financial Times, as reported on MoneyNews.com, “The OMB figures showed that in 2012 alone, 13 programs of the federal government made a combined $101.3 billion in improper payments – nearly $16 billion more than the highly charged budget sequester ended up cutting from government spending last year.”

Medicare overpayments make up the biggest slice of this mis-proportioned pie — a whopping $55.9 billion — but “the Internal Revenue Service had the highest error rate, a figure of 22.7 percent for the Earned Income Tax Credit program, amounting to $12.6 billion in improper payments in 2012.” Other agencies nudged up the numbers into the big time category: $6.2 billion for inappropriate unemployment insurance payments last year, $2.5 billion in mistaken “food stamp” outlays.

And just when you think the government has to be good at something. Like “writing checks” to some people at the expense of others.

Well, I guess the government is still “writing checks” and “making deposits.”

Just not doing it well.

The reason? Well, who would lose his or her job because his or her department disbursed funds to the wrong recipients? No one.

The federal workers administering these programs aren’t stupid. Aren’t dolts, or fools — that is, “chumps.” They’re simply behaving according to incentives.

Still, the more-than-chump-change errors make the city itself rather doltish. Call it Dolt City, shorten it to D.C.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
too much government

Society’s Interest

“Shame on Republicans for blocking the resumption of long-term unemployment benefits for 1.3 million Americans,” writes Democratic Party cheerleader and Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson.

“And shame on Democrats for letting them,” he adds, meaning that talking-head Ds on your TV set aren’t currently bloviating enough about this R treachery to suit Mr. Robinson . . . as if more is even frighteningly possible.

Robinson calls the GOP resistance to the extension of benefits paid beyond 52 weeks an “exercise in gratuitous inhumanity.” He tells of folks who lost good jobs during the ongoing economic unpleasantness, who have been looking for work unsuccessfully for over a year. “They are people whose lives have been buffeted by forces beyond their control,” he explains.

True enough, agonizing enough. Only a fool wouldn’t consider that, as I so often heard growing up, “there, but for the grace of God, go I.”

Robinson then asks, “Isn’t it in society’s interest to give them a chance?”

Well, what is that chance? A functioning, diverse job-creating market economy — not a politician-centered redistribution regime.

Robinson argues that (a) unemployment benefit payments will create jobs (so that unemployment, in a roundabout way, creates employment?), (b) it’s been done before (compelling, eh?), and (c) that the $25 billion dollar price tag is “little more than a rounding error.”

Which brings us back to the Democrats.

Republicans demand that Democrats prioritize spending — since money doesn’t grow on taxpayers — and find enough cuts to offset this itsy-bitsy, teensy-weensy “rounding error.”

The answering silence? Profound.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

A Cry for Justice

Is taking bread from the mouths of those who labor to feed the appetites of able-bodied adults who decline to work your idea of economic justice?

Or of injustice?

A recent Cato Institute study by Michael Tanner and Charles Hughes found that welfare benefits exceed the minimum wage for workers in 35 states. In 15 states, welfare benefits top $31,200 annually — equivalent to the $15 an hour minimum wage that SEIU and other unions are promoting for fast-food workers.

In short, at the lowest rungs of the economy, one can make more money not working.

The Washington Post’s Charles Lane advances another aspect of economic justice in a recent column suggesting that while some wealth is merited, the bulk of the wealth swirling about in the nation’s capital is not earned, but wrested from a system where insider politics meets crony capitalism.

And Lane notes that “too many of our public institutions — from Congress to big-city school systems — have been captured by rent-seeking interest groups,” warning broadly that, “Various societies have grown free and prosperous by many different methods; dividing up existing wealth according to political connections is not one of them.”

Yesterday at Townhall, I embraced the idea of economic justice, calling for a healthy dose of it, namely:

  1. Stop making welfare pay better than work;
  2. End government subsidies to cronies, farmers, everyone;
  3. Let people create new businesses by ending licensing laws and regulations that serve only to block needed competition.

That’s economic justice.

Not futzing about trying to make us “equal,” but making the basic rules equitable.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Planners Cover Up Waste

You know that politicians waste money. You guess that they waste a lot of time.

But did you know they deliberately waste our time?

Transportation scholar Randal O’Toole regales us with the fix that California’s overlords have put themselves in. Merely assuming that dense city living decreases commuting, California’s legislators cooked up a law requiring local governments to increase population density.

But it turns out “transportation models reveal that increased densities actually increase congestion, as measured by ‘level of service,’ which,” O’Toole informs us, “measures traffic as a percent of a roadway’s capacity and which in turn can be used to estimate the hours of delay people suffer.”

So what to do? Golden State’s august solons have exempted cities and municipalities from calculating and disclosing the bad effects of their own legislation. They offer other standards, all of which, O’Toole explains, demonstrate only “that planners and planning enthusiasts in the legislature don’t like the results of their own plans, so they simply want to ignore them.”

The gist of the new standards of “regulation”? “[T]hey ignore the impact on people’s time and lives: if densification reduces per capita vehicle miles traveled by 1 percent, planners will regard it as a victory even if the other 99 percent of travel is slowed by millions of hours per year.”

It’s quite apparent that politicians are willing to sacrifice our time to get what they — not we — want. Time is not money. Time is more important than money.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture too much government

We Can Do With Less When Less Is More

With congressional approval ratings at the lowest ever, it’s evident: the sclerotic old institution needs new blood.

But note what I’m not saying — that “Congress doesn’t do enough.”

As A. Barton Hinkle points out in a column, yesterday, complaints about the 113th Congress hail from “CNN to McClatchy to NPR to the L.A. Times,” one lamentation dominating: “the 113th makes ‘the infamous “do-nothing Congress” of the late 1940s look downright prolific.’”

But, as he makes clear, the complaint is witless.

Producing more bad legislation is certainly no improvement. And, as Hinkle observed, the most talked-about recent congressional responses to apparently real problems have been widely judged worse than the problems themselves. Almost everybody was glad that SOPA — the “Stop Online Piracy Act” — didn’t pass; vast majorities opposed and now regret Obamacare.

So, why is most new legislation bad? The reasons are legion, but one stands out: Congress doesn’t even have time to read the laws it debates and passes. 

A British economist explained it like this:

[E]ven Members of Parliament find the burthen of reading through the multitudinous and mazy provisions of the Bills issued day by day . . . too heavy to be borne by mortal man.

That was over a hundred years ago. It’s worse in this new year of 2014, both in Britain and America. Today’s laws are cooked up in back rooms by legislative assistants and lobbyists. When such is “more,” less is better.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment too much government

IRS Returns Money It Stole

A year after the IRS seized their bank account, Terry Dehko and his daughter have gotten their money back, thanks to a lawsuit they undertook with the help of the valiant Institute for Justice.

The IRS had looked at how the Dehkoses deposited revenues from their Fraser, Michigan store and decided, without further inquiry, that they were illegally “structuring” the deposits so that their bank would not have to submit currency transaction reports.

The reporting threshold is $10,000; most of the Dehkoses’ deposits were indeed less than $10,000. However, $10,000 is also the maximum loss that their insurance policy would cover in the event of theft! How hard would it have been to simply ask the reason for the deposit pattern?

Nor did the folks at the IRS ever show evidence of tax evasion or other illegality.

The Dehkoses have their money back. But they’ve lost a year. And lost any profits they might have earned by investing those unavailable funds, as well as any profits they might have earned by spending the time on their business that they instead spent trying to get their money back. Of course, the IRS will not be required to compensate the Dehkos for either psychic pain or lost opportunities.

There’s plenty more wrong with the agency’s conduct than is suggested by this case. At the least, though, it should be illegal to seize bank balances absent any showing of wrongdoing. And IRS officers who perpetrate such arbitrary seizures should be punished.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.