Category: too much government

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too much government

Buck-Stop Bus Stop

A million dollars here, a million there, and pretty soon you’re talking about a real bus stop.

At least, that’s the sticker shock in Arlington County, Virginia, just minutes south of our nation’s capital; a bus stop costs a million bucks.

“Is it made of gold?” asked one commuter.

Others called it “ridiculous,” an “outrage,” and suggested someone get “their butt canned.”

Let us properly note, however, that local transportation officials have unequivocally pronounced this state-of-the-art bus stop “an investment in infrastructure to support the [Columbia] Pike’s renewal.” According to Washington Post reporting, “New and densely developed housing is expected to be built in the next 20 years,” along the highway — not to mention a planned streetcar with a $250 million price-tag.

Think Arlington taxpayers are lazy and wasteful? Well, 80 percent of the money for the bling bus stops came from state and federal taxpayers. And county officials are hoping federal taxpayers will fork over 30 percent of the streetcar project, too.

There are so many exasperating elements to this fiasco that it’d be easy to callously ignore the fact that the million-dollar-bus-stop-shelter, as County Board member Libby Garvey put it, “doesn’t seem to be a shelter.” Calling it “pretty,” she added, “but I was struck by the fact that if it’s pouring rain, I’m going to get wet, and if it’s cold, the wind is going to be blowing on me.”

If you don’t like wasting a million dollars on a shelter that doesn’t provide shelter, chill out; the county is only planning to build another 24 shelters, and at a savings — only a smidgen over $900,000 each.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

P.S. After news reports, lots of folks apparently refused to “chill out” causing Arlington County officials to abruptly suspend plans, for now, to build 24 more million-dollar “Super Stop” bus stops. Hooray!

Categories
too much government

War Costs Ever Mount

War has costs . . . and prices. The costs include everything we give up to wage it, and everything taken away by the violence: lives, property, and (sometimes) sacred honor. The prices include the monetary expenditures that keep on adding up.

A recent Associated Press story warns us that the “Costs of Wars Linger for Over 100 Years.” The U.S. government is still paying for World War I, costing taxpayers $20 million per year. Spending on veterans of World War II peaked in 1991, while the Vietnam conflict still soaks up taxpayer dollars:

A congressional analysis estimated the cost of fighting the war was $738 billion in 2011 dollars, and the post-war benefits for veterans and families have separately cost some $270 billion since 1970. . . .

We can expect the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to take money for scores of years after the cessation of fighting — and let’s hope it does cease, some day.

How long can we continue to pay? Very:

There are 10 living recipients of benefits tied to the 1898 Spanish-American War at a total cost of about $50,000 per year. The Civil War payments are going to two children of veterans — one in North Carolina and one in Tennessee — each for $876 per year.

This may seem idiotic, but it’s inevitable.

One element of the story, not mentioned in the reportage, is something I hear from friends: The Veterans Administration more than accommodates increasing its rolls not merely of the recent wounded, but from ancient veterans who received no war wounds. It’s part of the natural expansion of bureaucracy.

The price of war just goes on and on, and up and up.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

A Coffin for Special-Interest Regulation

This is a story about monks and coffins, not vampires and coffins. But, since it takes place in Louisiana, you might be thinking “vampires.” And not just because Interview With a Vampire, Fevre Dream, Dracula 2000 and True Blood have all focused on the Pelican State as a hotbed of undead activity.

You see, it also deals with government. And — of course! — a particular kind of bloodsucking.

The brothers of Saint Joseph Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in Covington, Louisiana, began to make hand-make caskets in 2007. The enterprise was designed as a fund-raising effort to help cover educational and health-care expenses. But the state’s Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors swooped in and shut down the operation before one wooden “final resting place” had been sold.

And so the monks sued, arguing that the restriction was arbitrary and “served no legitimate public purpose and existed only to funnel money to the funeral-director cartel.”

Exactly. That’s how these sort of things work. The government allows special interests to regulate markets, and suck as much wealth up as possible. It’s the most common form of vampirism today.

Yesterday, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found in favor of the monks, ruling unanimously. This is historic. And inspiring.

And, yes, it’s the result of good work done by the Institute for Justice, a free-market legal outfit that represented the monks.

Still, I wonder: Do we owe this eminently just ruling at least in part to the easy-to-empathize-with plaintiffs? Would the ruling have been so favorable had the suit been initiated by ordinary Joes? Or an irascible old vampire hunter? (I say this knowing that the folks at IJ are polite, professional, and, uh, youthful, if not eternally so.)

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Clipart from Clipartheaven.com

Categories
Accountability national politics & policies too much government

Sequester Squeezes Solons

The deep, excruciating pain inflicted by the infamous sequester’s automatic $85 billion in spending cuts is beginning to crush the spirit of our glorious leaders.

Every stroke of the pen hurts, as congressional budgets are slashed a mindless 8.2 percent. The resultant chaos, we are told, presents a fatal threat to our survival as a nation.

A recent Washington Post exposé revealed more than a few of the budget-cutting horrors:

  • Congressional offices are wantonly canceling magazine subscriptions. Magazines contain important facts desperately needed by those entrusted with governing every aspect of our existence. Denied essential reading material, national literacy levels could plummet.
  • Communication between congressional representatives and their constituents is being disrupted as offices increasingly respond through low cost e-mail, instead of mailing through the more expensive U.S. Post Office.
  • Foreign junkets are also getting scrutinized. For instance, the congressional delegation sent to Rome to welcome the new pope dared the indignity of flying commercial.

It has gotten so bad that U.S. Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.) was forced to actually look into the phone bill paid by his congressional office. He found he could save $200 a month.

The sickening reality of budget cuts? They always hit our poor leaders hardest. But somehow, without magazines or lavish junkets, forced to use email and fly commercial and occasionally peruse a bill, our solons bravely carry on.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

“Good” Civilization-Destroying Intentions

Should we surrender our industrially fueled civilization the better to fuel fantasies of appeasing Gaia, goddess of the Earth?

The New York Times urges the Obama administration to block a much-needed oil pipeline from Canada as a gesture toward deflecting the purported threat of anthropogenic global warming.

“In itself, the Keystone pipeline will not push the world into a climate apocalypse,” admits the editorial. “But it will continue to fuel our appetite for oil and add to the carbon load in the atmosphere. There is no need to accept it.” The oil drops add up. “At the very least, saying no to the Keystone XL will slow down plans to triple tar sands production from just under two million barrels a day now to six million barrels a day by 2030.”

That’s what we want, right? Less and less of the fuel we need to go places and do things?

But if government is justified in blocking the Keystone pipeline on such a basis, isn’t it also warranted in stopping existing oil production?

What offends the “greens” is every form of “raping of the earth” for mere human survival and comfort — including to protect ourselves against weather that has always been variable, often extremely so. By their logic, the only moral way to defend against the elements is to surrender to them. No more building houses, wearing coats, adding gas to heater tanks and car tanks. Shut everything down.

I can’t say I’m persuaded.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
judiciary nannyism too much government

A Big Gulp for Bloomberg

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s much-talked-about prohibition of large-size sugary drinks, like Coke and Pepsi, set to have gone into effect today, has been over-ruled. At least temporarily. New York Supreme Court Judge Milton Tingling put the kibosh on the law, on Monday, enjoining and restraining the city “from implementing or enforcing the new regulations.”

Mayor Bloomberg promises to appeal the ruling. Apparently, he sees this as such an important policy move that spending taxpayers’ money on legal fees is another great thing he can do for the people he’s supposed to serve.

But, until his next assault, let’s appreciate the judge’s ruling:

In halting the drink rules, Judge Tingling noted that the incoming sugary drink regulations were “fraught with arbitrary and capricious consequences” that would be difficult to enforce with consistency “even within a particular city block, much less the city as a whole.”

“The loopholes in this rule effectively defeat the stated purpose of the rule,” the judge wrote.

The judge also censured Bloomberg for overstepping his bounds by cooking up the regs not via the City Council — the city’s legislative body — but from the Board of Health, which just happens to have been appointed by . . . Michael Bloomberg.

The prohibition of larger-sized soft drinks never made much sense. Add onto its limited scope (applying to some vendors, not others) and its core notion (prohibiting sale by dosage, when consumers could with only marginal inconvenience get around the rules) Bloomberg’s legislative hanky panky, and it wasn’t just any Nanny State horror.

It was an autocratic move.

Nicely stopped. For now.

This is COmmon Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall term limits too much government

Don’t Copy Chávez

Americans eager to weaken various limits on political power here at home should pay closer attention to news from abroad.

Around the globe, killing presidential term limits is high on the to-do list of aspiring presidents-for-life.

Autocrats also dislike the right of citizen initiative. Even when they abstain from trying to kill initiative rights altogether, they often seek outrageous restrictions on them, or even stoop to harassing petitioners and voters.Hugo Cloned

One such enemy of the people was Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez, now dead. Chávez was an equal-opportunity attacker of citizen rights. He expropriated businesses, bullied media, once even ordered soldiers to fire on anti-Chávez protesters (they refused). He also succeeded in eliminating presidential term limits.

In 2003, his government arranged for the public release of the names of Venezuelans who had signed a petition to recall Chávez. The names were stolen from the office charged with overseeing the petition drive and leaked to a pro-Chávez legislator, who then published them on his website. Many signers lost jobs, loans, and other opportunities controlled by the state.

American foes of term limits, initiative rights, and other constraints on concentrated power may think there’s no comparison. But every chipping away at protections against tyranny is dangerous.

While it is true that no single limit on power can substitute for all the cultural values and ideas that underlie our rights as free citizens, it is also the case that institutions and culture reinforce each other. The foundation of a building has more than one cornerstone.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

Video: Subsidies, USA

Politicians love to throw money around, especially to appreciative donors; and many, many businesses love favored treatment, and know how to show their appreciation.

Categories
nannyism too much government

Throw the Bums’ Meat Out?

“Beggars can’t be choosers.”

“Never look a gift horse in the mouth.”

These two maxims of generations past sought to curb ingratitude, a sense of entitlement, or even cultivated taste amongst those dependent on the kindness of others — thus preventing the poor from making the best the enemy of the adequate.

But today beggars and gift-horse recipients have the government to look out for them.

Todd Starnes, writing for Fox News, relates the story of the Louisiana Health and Hospitals Department nixing a generous gift of sixteen hundred pounds of venison to a rescue mission:

“Deer meat is not permitted to be served in a shelter, restaurant or any other public eating establishment in Louisiana,” said a Health Dept. official in an email to Fox News. “While we applaud the good intentions of the hunters who donated this meat, we must protect the people who eat at the Rescue Mission, and we cannot allow a potentially serious health threat to endanger the public.”

Another valiant attempt to “help” those worst off in society.

Sarcasm aside, the Louisiana venison was no random benefaction. The hunters had been officially encouraged to hunt, and to donate extra meat, which then went to a processing plant.

But the government, which is here to help us (or so it is said), stepped in. The bureaucrats could have inspected the meat, but, instead, even went out of their way to throw the meat into garbage bins and douse it with Clorox.

Just so no animals would get sick, either.

A predictable result of the way Americans have chosen to “protect”* the food supply. As in so many other areas, it is always the poor (in this case, the homeless) who are hurt the most.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* The full story has yet to really come out. The beneficent hunters have met with a number of government attorneys and professional backpedallers, and have been promised to be informed of the exact laws/regulations that the venerable venison donors allegedly broke. And this loose-knit diet of dignitaries plans to cook up legislation to “make sure this never happens again.”

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Free Money?

Monday, I lamented our deeply-indebted federal government’s policy towards the states: Bribery.

It busily borrows more and more money to entice our more fiscally sound state governments into dramatically expanding Medicaid spending to ever less sustainable levels. I also noted that several Republican Governors who were long opposed to Obamacare are now taking the bribes.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker isn’t one of them, but he appeared on Fox News Sunday to speak with host Chris Wallace, who said:

“As you well know, seven Republican governors have agreed to the expansion of [Medicaid] to 133 percent of the poverty [line] . . . And they say they’re doing it because of, if you will, free money. . . . [C]ritics say that your decision is, one, going to cost your state millions of dollars and, two, going to mean a lot of people in Wisconsin are uninsured.”

“In our case,” explained Walker, “we actually reduced the number of uninsured, we reduced the number of people on Medicaid and we actually saved a little bit of money.”

Wallace then asked if he feared Congress wasn’t going to live up to its end of the bargain.

“No doubt about it,” Walker responded. “Just for my cost to continue Medicaid in the state of Wisconsin, without any expansion, it cost me $644 million more in this budget. Thirty-nine percent of that is because the federal government under the Affordable Care Act and other provisions is pulling back on their previous commitments. That’s today. That’s without the expansion. . . . If Congress can’t fulfill the commitments they’ve made, I’m concerned about where they’re going to be in the future.”

Wallace then asked Governor Markell (D-Delaware), “why is it that he doesn’t trust Washington and you do?”

That question went unanswered.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.