Category: too much government

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national politics & policies too much government

EPA Won’t Stop Polluting

The Environmental Protection Agency is one of the country’s most dangerous polluters, striving to blanket our economic life in a suffocating ideological miasma.

The EPA’s poisonous ruling that carbon dioxide — “a colorless, odorless, non-toxic gas” — constitutes a “threat” to public health and the environment has been endorsed by the Obama administration and now the U.S. Court of Appeals in DC. If it is never rescinded, economic growth will suffer. Representative democracy will also suffer, given how Congress has been bypassed here.EPA, polluting

Just FYI, we’d be dead ducks without carbon dioxide. The notion that carbon dioxide is a pollutant must flabbergast all plants, which blithely use carbon dioxide as a critical component in photosynthesis, thereby making all carbon-based animal and human life possible. (Damn you, plants!)

Unproven assumptions regarding the extent to which industrial activity adds to greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide — even the extent to which the planet has warmed and will warm further, or to what extent any variation in average global temperature is even a special problem, let alone a catastrophic one — lie at the hemorrhaging heart of EPA’s hubris.

EPA officials suppose that they can smartly operate a globe-wide climate machine by increasing the expense or reducing the supplies of the fossil fuels that we use to warm our homes, drive our cars, operate our assembly lines. No, bureaucrats can’t centrally plan the earth’s atmosphere. But they sure can make it harder for people to survive and prosper.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
judiciary Tenth Amendment federalism too much government

Resistance Still Possible

According to a majority on the Supreme Court, Obamacare’s penalty for not buying medical insurance is constitutional because it’s a “tax,” not a “penalty.” Hmmm. All taxes may penalize, and penalties sure can be “taxing,” but this similarity doesn’t give us license to swap one for the other.

Chief Justice John Roberts reportedly flip-flopped about whether the Obamacare mandate is unconstitutional — perhaps in fear of left-leaning politicians and pundits. (“We’re not going to like you if you hinder our tyrannical medical regime by applying constitutional principles!”)John Roberts, flip/flop

The chief’s formal opinion states that under the Constitution the wisdom of legislation is a “judgment . . . reserved to the people.” Whoa. Hasn’t Marbury been decided? Doesn’t the courts’ power of judicial review help ensure that constitutional restraints on government power continue to restrain?

Well, just because the Roberts Court refuses to do its job doesn’t mean we must twiddle our thumbs in response. We can fight for an anti-Obamacare majority in Congress and the White House in November.

We can also urge our state governments to decline to cooperate with Obamacare right now. As wretched as it is, the court’s ruling at least overrules the new law’s attempt to force states to massively expand Medicaid. Almost immediately after the ruling, Florida Governor Rick Scott, who had refused to cooperate with other aspects of the law, announced that Florida will not expand Medicaid eligibility. A dozen or so other governors have made similar commitments.

What about your governor? Do you need to make a phone call?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
judiciary tax policy too much government

Supreme Oxymorons

With the Supreme Court’s decision in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has achieved its first milestone: The repudiation of logic, the Orwellian assertion that A both is and is not A.

The reform package, popularly known as Obamacare, requires that individuals buy medical insurance. If you fail to do so, the law imposes a fine.Justice Roberts

The zillion page legislation refers to this financial penalty 18 times. It never refers to a tax.

Its principal booster, President Obama, repeatedly insisted it wasn’t a tax. And as Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his dissent, “We have no doubt that Congress knew precisely what it was doing when it rejected an earlier version of this legislation that imposed a tax instead of a requirement-with-penalty.”

But Chief Justice John Roberts, a George W. Bush-nominee, joined the four liberal justices to declare that what was not a tax, when proposed and passed, now is a tax — so that it could be declared constitutional under Congress’s taxing power. Roberts explains:

Congress did not intend the payment to be treated as a “tax” for purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act. The Affordable Care Act describes the payment as a “penalty,” not a “tax.” That label cannot control whether the payment is a tax for purposes of the Constitution, but it does determine the application of the Anti-Injunction Act.

Only were Obamacare not a tax could it be litigated at this time under the Anti-Injunction Act. Accordingly, the majority says it is not a tax. But it can only be ruled constitutional if it is a tax. So, the High Court calls it a tax and not a tax at the same time.

The dissent called this “remarkable.” Stronger words spring to mind.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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insider corruption too much government

Squelching the Revolution

During the months of primaries and caucuses, the popularity of Ron Paul was a fear expressed amongst both neoconservative and “mainstream” Republican insiders in hushed tones, rarely ever surfacing, but instead roiling under politics’ prudential lid. Now that Mitt Romney has sealed the nomination with enough delegates from the primary states, GOP insiders are trying to solidify their position.

Instead of magnanimously bringing Ron Paul’s supporters into the party to court them for the next four years, they seem to be doing their darnedest to keep them out. Take Romney’s gubernatorial state, Massachusetts.No Revolution

The GOP machine, there, has required that the Ron Paul nominees to the Tampa convention sign an affidavit to support Mitt. This is something new. Just for Ron Paul delegates. And of course some

libertarian-leaning delegates balked at the notion of signing legal affidavits pledging what they had committed verbally at the caucuses where they were elected. Many later submitted them, but not until after the deadline.

As a result, the committee disqualified them, winnowing the number of Liberty delegates and alternates to the convention from 35 to 19. . . .

Not surprisingly, the duly elected delegates “feel cheated.”

A spokesman for the Massachusetts Republican Party would not say why the affidavits were required of delegates this year, and the chairman of the Allocations Committee would not agree to an interview. Instead, the chairman offered an e-mailed statement saying that the Romney campaign, through its representative on his committee, had the right to reject delegates for “just cause.”

When I prophesy negative consequences of a Mitt Romney presidency, this sort of thing lingers in my mind. What is the GOP afraid of? Actual limits on government?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment general freedom too much government

Robots in Amber

In 2010, Newark, New Jersey, collected more than $3 million in fines based on the watchful (and programmed) work of red-light/amber-light intersection cameras. The next year there were even more violations.

Politicians love these Orwellian devices, while citizens remain extremely suspicious.

New Jersey recently suspended ticketing based on the results from 63 of the state’s 85 intersection cameras. It seems that these specific cameras (including all those in Newark) had not been properly configured according to the specifications set by the enabling legislation.Big Brother Is Watching You

A Star-Ledger report neatly explains the calibration method, which requires intersection speed studies to set the proper duration of the amber lights. Figuring caution-light duration based on actual intersection speeds, not on posted speed limits — that is, the average actual speed of 85 percent of drivers — would seem to have something to do with safety. The 85 percent rule is an old highway safety engineering standard, and safety is allegedly why governments are involved in this at all.

A problem, though: This compliance procedure is great for setting speed limits, but in this case, wouldn’t it punish slower, legal drivers on streets where people tend to drive faster than the limit? Were the overwhelming majority of folks to speed through intersections, that would correspondingly lower the duration of the amber lights. Consequence? The folks most likely to receive tickets would be those who drove slowly through the intersections.

Hardly a good idea. As one driver commented, “Virtually from green it turns into red.”

More telling against the cameras is the increase in infractions, suggesting that the robotic cameras do not have a net instructional effect.

That is, they don’t make intersections safer.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
insider corruption too much government

The Why of San Jose

You have no doubt heard about Obama’s recent “gaffe” about “the private sector’s doing fine.”

The private sector, of course, is not doing well, not at all — and it’s suffering from a public sector gone mad: Bailouts, increased spending, increased debt, increased regulation.

But our beleaguered and benighted president was trying to make the point that it’s our public sector that’s doing badly.Chance PENSION

And there is something to be said — carefully, with much caution — about public sector jobs. In many states and locales, government jobs are not increasing in number. Well, at least not increasing as fast as bailout mania might lead you to think.

And Josh Barro knows why. Public sector jobs are in decline because public sector compensation has been skyrocketing, depleting resources from state and municipal governments, preventing job increases.

San Jose, for instance, used to have 7.5 employees per 1,000 residents. Now the city’s down to 5.6 employees per thou, “with further cuts expected next year.” Why?

[C]osts for a full-time equivalent employee are astronomical and skyrocketing. San Jose spends $142,000 per FTE on wages and benefits, up 85 percent from 10 years ago. As a result, the city shed 28 percent of its workforce over that period, even as its population was rising.

Blame it on pensions, grossly over-promised.

It’s a problem politicians have: They like to dole out favors. And pensions are something they can promise without funding fully, making “future politicians” (uh, taxpayers) pay (like, uh, now). It’s the scandal of the age.

But I wonder if Obama would ever ’fess up to the real nature of the problem

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
too much government

The Real Whopper

“Today, government at all levels consumes 37 percent of the total economy, or GDP,” Mitt Romney said earlier this month. “If Obamacare is allowed to stand, government will reach half of the American economy.”

Glenn Kessler’s Fact Checker column at the Washington Post slapped that statement with four “Pinocchios,” the worst possible condemnation for telling “whoppers.”

Yet, Kessler acknowledges Romney’s point. In 2011, local, state and federal “government expenditures amounted to 37.34 percent of the gross domestic product.” That percentage is expected to climb to just over 39 percent by 2020.

“But Romney goes way too far,” writes Kessler. Romney counts private medical expenditures, which will supposedly account for 10 percent of the projected 2020 economy. Romney’s campaign spokesperson argues Obamacare in part mandates that spending and thus the 10 percent is part of government’s “reach.”

Of course, the vast majority of all private payments for medical care — the 10 percent — would happen with or without Obamacare. So Romney’s figure does exaggerate. Still, government commandeering 37 or 39 percent of our economy seems a whopping amount.

Moreover, in making his case against including private health care spending, Kessler argues, under Romney’s notion of government reach, “a wide variety of industries, such as banking or housing, should also be counted as part of this government-controlled economy.” Well, yes. Government spending accounts for nearly 40 percent of America’s GDP. Plus, government heavily regulates and interjects itself into major parts of the private sector.

Kessler thinks Romney’s statement is a real whopper, but Romney is on to something. What’s really whopping is government’s full reach, which includes over-reach.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets responsibility too much government

Legislating Only Profits

J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon testified before the Senate Banking Committee yesterday about the $2 billion in trading losses suffered by his company’s London office last month.

Congress is shocked that money can be lost trading derivatives. And our legislative leaders seem to seriously think they can write rules for banks and other financial institutions that protect everyone from such losses, making certain any trading in financial securities is guaranteed to earn a profit.Jamie Dimon

“We will lose some of our shareholders’ money,” Dimon acknowledged, “and for that, we feel terrible. But no client, customer or taxpayer money was impacted by this incident.” In fact, J.P. Morgan Chase is nonetheless expected to turn a profit this quarter — as it has consistently done since the financial crisis.

Still, some politicians and policy makers fear the nation’s largest bank is “too big to fail,” that a collapse could again threaten the stability of the entire economy.

I liked what Rob Cox of Reuters TV’s Fast Forward urged Dimon to tell the senators: “We are not going to fail, but if we do, the failure will be our own. We will bear it on our bond holders, our investors and it will not be a public problem.”

Cox went on to endorse “this idea that banks can go out and they can lose money and they can make money,” adding that “at the end of the day it’s their money, not our money, that’s at risk.”

In other words, no bailouts.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies political challengers too much government

The Monkey on Their Backs

The “war on drugs” is not a mere metaphorical war, like the “war on poverty.”

The biggest problem with the term is not the subject, but the object: Our forces don’t shoot at pills and pipes and chemicals and syringes.

They shoot at people.

Sometimes dealers. Often just users. Too often innocents . . . “collateral damage” in a war that seems never to end, because impossible to win.

But if the war seems bad in America — now a land with the world’s largest gulag — it’s far, far worse in Mexico, especially since President Felipe Calderón turned the military on his own people, in the vain hope of subduing the drug traffickers.

What did he get for his efforts? Blood, death and terror.

The body count is over 50,000.

I’ve long advocated drug legalization. I don’t need to elaborate the reasons, not after 50,000 deaths have been weighed in on the pro-drug war side, but I probably should mention a few notions that the drug-war mentality suppresses: individual responsibility, a rule of law, and peace.

In America, our politicians slowly awake to the truth that killing people to prevent them from ruining their lives with drugs is a fool’s mission. But few yet commit to actual change.

In Mexico, on the other hand, the top three candidates to replace Calderón — whose service is limited, by law, to just the one term — go a step further: All agree that the drug war has to be scaled down.

Little talk, so far, of legalization, but hey: The addiction to war is a tough monkey to shrug off.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

How Not to Help the Poor

Q. When’s the best time to kick out the bottom rungs of a ladder?

A. After everybody’s climbed it.

So, when’s the best time to raise the minimum wage?

After everybody is being paid at a higher rate.

Contrary to innocent expectations, minimum wage laws don’t guarantee that people will be hired to work at or above the minimum. Instead, they prohibit businesses from hiring (or workers from accepting jobs) below the minimum rate. That is, rates are guaranteed, but the jobs are discouraged.

A recent push by House Democrats to raise the national minimum wage to ten bucks per hour was stalled by leadership. Left-leaning representatives cried foul. But a report in The Hill explains the reluctance: “Concerns about the economy have increased since last Friday, when a jobs report showed an anemic May during which only 69,000 jobs were added. A higher minimum wage could discourage employers from creating more jobs and that, in turn, could hurt President Obama in the election.”

It turns out that the more clever Democrats are considering, instead, a plan to slowly, gradually raise the rates.

This would mean fewer unemployed right away. The fewer people hurt, all the less likely that voters would put two and two together and blame them, and their minimum wage rate hike.

This is how politicians hurt Americans, most of the time: In increments small enough not to cause an uproar.

In this case, it’s the poorest who are hurt most, those who haven’t yet climbed the proverbial ladder. Democrats, ideologically blind to the results of their regulations, feel nothing.

Besides, they know that, in America, most poor folks don’t vote.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.