Category: Accountability

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Accountability initiative, referendum, and recall responsibility

Democracy on the Sly

Citizens for Responsible Government, CAVE, CAVES , Mayor Sly James , Dan Coffey, Kansas City, JGill, Paul Jacob, Common Sense, collage, photomontage

Mayor Sly James loves his city: Kansas City, Missouri.

He dreams of a shining new airport on a hill, a land of milk and honey with a new, luxurious, taxpayer-financed downtown hotel. He envisions it as a harmonious hub in which the thrill of . . . waiting for a richly subsidized streetcar is ubiquitous.

Yet, at every turn, a group of pesky citizens, Citizens for Responsible Government, has dashed the mayor’s dreams.

How?

  • A 2013 initiative petition drive blocked the $1.5 billion airport project.
  • Through a 2014 initiative effort, voters soundly defeated a streetcar expansion.
  • Weeks ago, this same rambunctious mob of retirees turned in enough signatures to force a public vote regarding the $311 million subsidy plan for a new downtown hotel.

“This is democracy at work,” claims Dan Coffey, serving as the group’s spokesperson.

For his part, the mayor offers, “I respect the people’s right to voice their opinion, but . . . I’m going to fight for this hotel deal.”

A man of principle!

Mayor Sly has taken to calling Coffey’s group CAVE — “Citizens Against Virtually Everything.” Coffey only notes that the mayor has left out a letter: the acronym should be CAVES — “Citizens Against Virtually Everything Stupid.”

“We started off a group of interested citizens that didn’t like the way things were going, particularly the way taxpayer money was being spent in Kansas City,” Coffey recently told the Kansas City Star. “Everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it.”

Coffey’s group has changed that dynamic . . . using direct democracy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability national politics & policies responsibility

Assuming the Fix

caution, danger, debt, social security, collage, photomontage, illustration, JGill, Paul Jacob, Common Sense

Social Security, like similar systems in Europe, is on a trajectory to insolvency, which could lead to a sovereign debt crisis.

The reason for the crisis? Social Security has always been a pay-as-we-go system, dependent on many workers paying in to a system that sends their contributions to a smaller number of retirees. When the number of retirees expands above the ability of workers to cover at established rates, the system goes broke. Meanwhile, all the system’s budget overages from the beginning to the present date have not been saved and invested. Congress has been taking the overages and spending them, putting IOUs in a notebook.

It is a serious problem.

Or, it isn’t! That is, not if you believe The Nation, which states in a recent article that this is all the result of a legally mandated “bogus” accounting conceit. The Congressional Budget Office, you see,

assumes that Social Security and Medicare Part A will draw on the general fund of the US Treasury to cover benefit shortfalls following the depletion of their trust funds, which at the current rate will occur in 2034.
That would obviously lead to an exploding debt, but it’s a scenario prohibited by law.

The Nation’s somewhat confused author suggests the dire warnings are wrong because “Congress could preemptively pass laws to avert the situation before the deadline; it could take the approach favored by progressives and increase revenue to the programs by lifting the payroll tax cap, or alternatively raise the retirement age and lower benefits.”

Well, yes. But until a fix happens, the doomsday warning stands.

Why does he think we make the warning?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment general freedom responsibility

Heroism for Everybody

self defense, gun, responsibility, terrorism, collage, photomontage, JGill, Paul Jacob, Common Sense

Liberty is achieved, when it is achieved, at a price. Vigilance.

And this isn’t just an inspiring political message. It’s practical advice for extraordinary circumstances.

What’s the best thing to do if you meet a mass murderer on a rampage, or a terrorist on his mission? It may not be to merely call 911. As one counterterrorism consultant puts it, “We are conditioned to dial 911 and wait, but, in the case of an active shooter, that does not work.”

This conflict expert, Alon Stivi, went on to explain that “[m]ost casualties occur within the first ten or fifteen minutes, and police response usually is too late.”

And speaking of 911, remember that on 9/11/2001, the most successful anti-terrorist effort was by the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93.

That was heroism. It cost them their lives, but they accomplished something in that they saved lives, too.

Some people don’t like bringing this up for fear of, well, hurting some feelings. But Ari Armstrong has an answer for this:

If we avoid serious discussions about self-defense and survival tactics in cases of intended mass murder out of fear that such discussions are somehow insensitive to victims of past attacks, all we accomplish is to ensure that more people will be murdered in possible future attacks.

There is a reason we should keep ourselves fit, and alert. Who knows when we may be called upon, by circumstance, to defend not only ourselves and our loved ones, but our way of life?

Sure, this “call” is made by the unjust. But we, the just, should answer anyway.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability national politics & policies responsibility tax policy

Raising Taxes & Truth

tax, taxes, debt, national debt, truth, collage, photomontage, JGill, Paul Jacob, Common Sense

Sheila Weinberg wants to raise your taxes. So fervent is her money-lust that she even threatens to run for president, and only half-jokingly, on that single issue.

More surprising: I would enthusiastically vote for her.

What gives?

Well, Weinberg isn’t demanding a tax increase or a spending cut, per se — just one and/or the other until accounts are balanced. She points out that tax increases tend to concentrate the minds of taxpayers to oppose greater spending by government. Otherwise, as long as governments — local, state and federal — can hide the true costs of their “services,” more will be spent, and more debt incurred, than the people can afford, or want.

That’s why this friendly CPA founded Truth in Accounting, a nonpartisan, non-profit group working to “compel governments to produce financial reports that are understandable, reliable, transparent and correct.”

Too much to ask? No, if you ask me, or you, or Sheila, or anyone else . . . until we inquire of politicians, and then, well . . . apparently, yes. And not merely at the federal level.

“For years, citizens have been told that their home state budgets have been balanced,” Weinberg recently told Watchdog.org. “If that were true, state debt would be zero . . .”

Yet, last month, Truth in Accounting issued its 2014 Financial State of the States report disclosing that state governments are truthfully — whether they admit it or not — a cumulative $1.3 trillion dollars in arrears. Individually, all but 11 states are carrying debt.

Lies won’t set us free. Or pay the bills.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Categories
Accountability folly government transparency national politics & policies

Democrats’ Own Private Government

Rahm Emanuel, Chicago Tribune, Chicago, transparency, government, collage, photomontage, JGill, Paul Jacob, Common Sense

Don’t feel lonely, Mrs. Clinton. You’re not the only public official shielding public actions from the public by using private modes of communication — a private email account and server, or texts on a personal cell phone.

Meet fellow Democrat Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The Chicago Tribune* recently took the Emanuel administration to court for the second time in three months. The paper charges the mayor is “[violating] state open records laws by refusing to release communications about city business conducted through private emails and text messages.”

Still pending is the World’s Greatest Newspaper’s first lawsuit against the mayor’s office, seeking the full disclosure of emails specifically concerning a $20-million-dollar no-bid public school contract, over which the Feds have now launched a criminal investigation.

The Trib argues in its legal complaint that Freedom of Information Act requests “have been met with a pattern of non-compliance, partial compliance, delay and obfuscation.” But on Chicago Tonight, Mayor Emanuel offered that, “[W]e always comply and work through all of the Freedom of Information [requests] in the most responsive way possible.”

Probably all just a big misunderstanding . . .

What’s especially droll is to find presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, two Democrats who have long fought against privatizing any government function or service no matter how inefficiently performed or delivered, suddenly embracing a creative new approach to privatizing government . . . beginning with their own transparency and accountability.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* In full disclosure, my brother, Mark Jacob, works for the Tribune.

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Accountability Common Sense term limits

Coming to Terms with A Logical Fallacy

Neocon, Neo Conservative, Photomontage, collage, Paul Jacob, Common Sense, JGill, Jim Gill

Good people can disagree about term limits.

It’s not a moral issue, but about practical governance.

I love term limits, while my friend Lew Rockwell, the former Ron Paul aide who started the Mises Institute and runs the popular website LewRockwell.com, isn’t a fan.

In a brief post to his site, entitled “The Term Limit Hoax,” Rockwell lamented that “Term limits apply only to the institutionally weakest branch of government, the legislature, to further weaken it, and never to the presidential bureaucracy, which actually runs the government, nor to the judges. It’s why neocons, those ultimate presidential supremacists, love term limits.”

This is the classic logical fallacy of guilt by association. Neoconservatives breathe air, too. Should the rest of us turn blue?

Usually if politicians — neocon or otherwise — claim amorous feelings for limits, as the late Bob Novak warned, “They’re lying.” Yet, most regular folks — all races, genders, political parties, levels of neocon-ness, you-name-it — actually do want term limits.

Lew’s correct: Congress is weak. It was designed to be the strongest branch, holding the all-important purse strings and a law-making monopoly. Yet, career politicians have shrunk from fulfilling the First Branch’s constitutional role, consistently handing more and more power to the executive branch and the courts.

That’s not the result of term limits, but a lack thereof.

Why is there “never” a push for term limits on the “presidential bureaucracy”? Well, those bureaucrats don’t even have terms as such. And any limits would have to be legislated by Congress. Congress enacted that bureaucracy, every cubicle of it, and the longer congressmen stay in Washington, the more they champion it.

Limit judges? A term-limited Congress might help there, too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Categories
Accountability Common Sense government transparency ideological culture national politics & policies political challengers

Walker vs. Union Power

Taxes Make Us Strong

Governor Scott Walker, who is running for the U. S. Presidency, has cooked up a white paper on the subject for which he is nationally known: labor relations. It’s a doozy.

His main points are:

  • Reduce the power of union bosses by eliminating the National Labor Relations Board.
  • Eliminate big-government unions.
  • Take “right to work”
  • Protect state employees’ First Amendment rights.

And that’s not the whole of it. Some of his points are worth quoting at length, including this:

On Day One of my administration, I will put in place accountability and transparency rules. I will require online disclosure of union expenditures, including revealing the total compensation of union officers, itemizing union trust fund expenditures, increasing reporting requirements for local affiliates of government employee unions, and restoring conflict-of-interest reporting requirements.

Walker’s is not a detailed, in-depth policy paper. It’s a list of goals, really. It does not address how he would accomplish this, if elected. It’s obvious that many (perhaps most) of these reforms would require congressional compliance and even legislation.

Yet by focusing on the inordinate power of government workers’ unions, Gov. Walker advances what many of us were hoping for when we first heard that the surprisingly daring, surprisingly successful Wisconsin governor would make a bid for the top spot in the federal government. Something needs changing.

And that something is the general purpose for government: what and whom government serves, other than itself, and how.

Or, in Walker’s words, “commonsense reforms” to narrow “the federal government’s role. . . .”

He says let’s close “special-interest loopholes . . . once and for all.”

Is that possible? It’s worth a try.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Taxes Make Us Strong

 

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Accountability Common Sense initiative, referendum, and recall tax policy

Evergreen Eyman

Stubborn Beast

“Initiative 1366 is blackmail,” one plaintiff charged.

No; it’s just political hardball.

Washington State voters have cast their ballots five times (by initiative measure) to require a two-thirds vote of both houses of the state legislature, or a vote of the people, to increase taxes.

Though the rule is neither hard to understand nor difficult to implement, legislators have repeatedly overruled the people they supposedly serve, overturning the measure and then, finally, suing to overturn the repeatedly re-enacted two-thirds requirement.

The Washington Supreme Court ruled that only through a constitutional amendment could citizens place upon their representatives the two-thirds mandate. And — you guessed it — the state’s initiative process doesn’t permit constitutional amendments, only statutes.

As I reported back in June, Tim Eyman and Voters Want More Choices haven’t skipped a beat. Their grassroots army collected over 335,000 voter signatures to place a new initiative on the ballot. This measure would cut a penny from the state sales tax unless legislators propose an amendment to the state constitution establishing the rule that taxes can only be raised via a two-thirds legislative vote or a popular vote.

The day after the signatures were verified and the measure placed on the ballot, a group of legislators and various special interests sued to block the measure from going to a vote. Last Friday, the court declared that Initiative 1366 would remain on the ballot for voters to decide.

So, whether “blackmail” or ingenious hardball, it looks like voters will have a chance to send a very direct message to their representatives: Do what the people want or else.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Stubborn Beast

 

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Accountability Common Sense government transparency national politics & policies porkbarrel politics tax policy too much government

The Spenders’ Eternal Excuse

Gluttony

Most modern welfare states have a huge problem: their politicians promise more than government revenue covers. So they borrow and borrow until they can borrow no more.

And then they go down. Like Greece has gone down. Banks are closed there, and the people suffer.

The problem is over-spending and over-promising (the latter being merely committing to future over-spending, so let’s just call it all over-spending). But when you confront a partisan of such extravagance — whether that person be a politician or a constituency beneficiary or an ideological socialist or social democrat — the most common defense is: THEY WOULDN’T LET US TAX ENOUGH.

The “they” in such defenses could be an opposition party, or a constituency, or . . . “the evil rich.”

But anyone with something other than a lump of coal for a brain knows the real truth: responsible people don’t make such defenses. If a political difficulty gets in the way of the extra revenue needed for something promised, it’s practically the same as an economic difficulty, so the excuse falls apart.

Say again?

If you cannot get enough revenue for your favorite program, it doesn’t matter whether the people who are the source of your “needed” revenue are broke — have nothing to give — or they simply balk at giving. The point is, you don’t have the revenue. The responsible reaction would be: cut back on spending.

Responsible people budget; irresponsible people blame others for not having the wherewithal to spend and spend and spend.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Gluttony

 

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Accountability Common Sense folly general freedom government transparency initiative, referendum, and recall tax policy

Republican-Required Referendum

Politicians in a jar

Last November, Nevada Republicans scored a “stunning” political sweep. The party’s incumbent governor rolled up a 40-point win, while the GOP gained majorities in both the Assembly and Senate — the first time Republicans have controlled all three since before the Great Depression.

At the same time, voters crushed a ballot measure to create a 2-percent gross receipts tax on businesses taking in over $1 million, by a whopping 78–22 percent. Gov. Brian Sandoval (R) and GOP legislators opposed the tax.

My tax-fighting friend Chuck Muth, president of Citizen Outreach, must be happy as a clam, living the easy life.

No?

Mere months after that vote, the solidly Republican state legislature passed — you guessed it — a gross receipts tax. And with it, for good measure, all stuffed into Senate Bill 483, the Republican majority also made permanent a whole slew of taxes passed as temporary measures back in 2009.

The total tax increase — ahem, to celebrate the Republican trouncing of Democrats — turned out to be the largest in Nevada history: $1.1 billion.

I wish this story of betrayal were shocking, not par for the course. But as we all know, the lack of surprise signals the depth of the problem.

Thankfully, Silver State citizens have what Ralph Nader calls the “ace in the hole”: statewide initiative and referendum.

Two referendum measures have been filed. One would repeal the gross receipts tax. The other, filed by Muth’s “We Decide Coalition,” places the entire billion-dollar-plus tax hike onto the ballot.

“It’s time for these elected elites to stop using Nevadans as ATM machines,” Muth recently wrote.

Yes, time for Nevadans to crank up the machinery of democracy . . . starting with 55,000 signatures on petitions for each measure.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Politicians in a jar