Category: Accountability

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Accountability too much government

Deep, Deep Waters

Are you surprised? I’m not surprised.

Turns out Congresswoman Maxine Waters had “family financial ties” to a bank for which she personally helped solicit bailout money. Without regard to its relative need or value to the economy.

Shocker.

Trillions in stimulus money, bailout money. And we expect politicians will allocate it according to some impersonal calculus that has nothing to do with who their chums are?

Nor can we expect the politicians and bureaucrats to sit back and let the market, or what’s left of it, function unhampered once bailout money has been forked over.

Many banks seemed to think they would simply be allowed to spend the subsidies according to their own judgment about how best to promote the health of their enterprises. But once the bailouts failed to work the instant magic they were supposed to, politicians began attaching strings. So that voters angry about the bailouts could see that there’s “accountability.”

It’s not just about trimming fat executive bonuses. The banks are also supposed to obey orders to cancel employee training, reduce dividends to shareholders, stop hiring employees from overseas, etc. This is about social engineering, not economic efficiency.

So, many banks now say they’ll give the money back. Good idea; great idea. But it would really surprise me if it found its way all the way back to taxpayers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability general freedom responsibility

Good Guys and Bad Guys

There are two types of people, those who divide people into wicked capitalists and saintly victims, and those who don’t.

The folks at ACORN, a lefty activist group, see only evil capitalists and downtrodden everybody-else.

Columnist Michelle Malkin reports how ACORN champions the cause of homeowners crushed by the credit crunch and housing collapse. Except that some of their poster-child victims are hardly innocent.

A few weeks ago, as a mob cheered and cameras recorded, an ACORN gang broke into a padlocked home in Baltimore. It had been owned by Donna Hanks, expelled when the bank foreclosed. “This is our house now,” ACORN activist Louis Beverly declared, with Donna by his side.

Man of the people, right?

Except that Hanks was not merely hammered by circumstances. She bought the house in 2001 for $87,000, but later refinanced for $270,000 — money she presumably spent. In 2008 the house was sold for less than the new loan but more than twice the 2001 price. In 2006, Hanks declared bankruptcy, but did not comply with the terms of the court. Malkin gives further details of her irresponsibility, but you get the idea.

There are innocent victims hurting, now, in the current financial collapse. But being a borrower rather than a lender tells us nothing by itself. As the antics of ACORN show, either can be the victim.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability free trade & free markets too much government

Able to Raise Keynes

Recently on This American Life, economists told NPR listeners how the then-upcoming stimulus bill would amount to the very first legitimate and full test ever of Keynesian ideas.

Sure, politicians have been using John Maynard Keynes’s notions as an excuse to deficit spend ever since the Great Depression. But then, Lord Keynes had wanted politicians to spend even more, more than they dared.

Now, President Obama and our Democratic Congress have decided to spend enough billions, or trillions, to really do the trick.

Switch to Larry King’s latest interview with Bill Clinton. Our former prez assured us that the stimulus bill “would do what it is supposed to,” and he mentioned three things, only one of them vaguely about stimulus. He said the bill was better seen as a “bridge over troubled waters.”

Clinton said the real issue was declining asset values, which Congress would address later.

At Mises.org, Stephan Kinsella asked how this could amount to Keynesianism. Clinton used a different lingo entirely.

Here’s how: It’s not that the bill will give us Keynesian stimulus. It’s that it has stimulated politicians in the old, old Keynesian way.

Congressional Democrats know that the stimulus won’t work. So they are preparing the spin now. From them we heard the official excuse for the bill. From Clinton, the future excuse.

Politicians know zip about the economy. They just know how to spend our money. And our great, great, great grandchildren’s.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability insider corruption

Washington On Display

Our rule-makers can’t follow their own rules. President Obama sets a new standard, forbidding lobbyists from being hired on in the White House. Then he promptly gives himself a waiver because, lo and behold, he just needs a certain lobbyist.

When politicians stand on principle, it’s usually so that principle can’t get up.

We have a Treasury secretary, one Timothy Geitner, who didn’t pay his taxes . . . well, not until he was picked to be Treasury secretary. A Washington Post headline called Geitner “too big to fail”; the U.S. Senate confirmed him.

Then there’s Roland Burris, the new U.S. Senator from Illinois. He now admits that he didn’t tell “the whole truth” when he testified before the Illinois House panel trying to impeach then-Governor Rod Blagojevich. Of course, Burris continues to deny what he is admitting.

Burris had been asked directly about being blagojeviched to raise money to get his seat in the U.S. Senate. But Burris said nothing at the time about being asked by the governor’s brother to raise funds. Burris also conveniently forgot to mention that he, in fact, had tried to raise money for the governor. Unsuccessfully.

Burris needs to go, and he’s far from alone. Think of Charles Rangel’s wrangled perks, his tax problems, his network of rent-controlled apartments.

Instead, all these masterminds will stay in power, allegedly to “fix” our economy.

But they’re the ones in need of “fixing.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability Common Sense free trade & free markets too much government

New Prez Pleads for Common Sense

I like a president who pleads for common sense.

Here’s the story, headlined in the New York Times: “Obama Calls for ’Common Sense’ on Executive Pay.”

The president announced a salary cap for top executives working for companies garnering the greatest gobs of booty under the most recent federal bailout. The cap? Half a million bucks.

President Obama allayed a few qualms, right away. He said that “This is America, we don’t disparage wealth. . . .” And he said, “we certainly believe that success should be rewarded.”

But he does talk about the “height of irresponsibility” in Bush administration bailouts, with execs taking huge bonuses after running their companies into the ground. Who wasn’t sickened by this? Obama sees it as common sense to make sure we don’t reward massive failure with the usual rewards of success.

Still, America is also about respecting contracts. Those corporations had negotiated very explicit contracts with their execs regarding the big bucks. And — surprise, surprise — Congress wrote up the law on the gargantuan bailouts without requiring those contracts be renegotiated.

And consider: Do we really want our politicians setting non-government salaries?

This is all a side issue, though. Take the bailouts themselves. Where’s the common sense there? They do reward failure. They will not help the economy. If our leaders had acted according to common sense, the whole salary issue wouldn’t even have come up.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability government transparency

Opaque Transparency

Colorado’s state treasurer, Cary Kennedy, is on the hot seat. When running for office, she promised to make the state’s spending more transparent. She has not followed through.

In a different age, such dilatoriness might have been overlooked. Today, the very medium that makes it easy to report what is happening with taxpayers’ money, the Internet, also makes it easy to pressure delinquent officials.

There are websites. The one calling Kennedy to account is a blog called Colorado Spending Transparency. Or COST.

COST recalls that during his 2006 campaign for Colorado State Treasurer, Kennedy observed that when you buy groceries, the receipt shows what you bought. Kennedy, too, she said, would “show you where your money goes.”

Colorado does post its annual budget online. But the COST blog wants a detailed, searchable database, as fifteen other states have provided.

Representative Don Marostica, who also championed transparency in his 2006 campaign, introduced a bill to require such online itemizing. The bill never made it out of committee. Marostica had planned to re-introduce the bill until Governor Ritter stated in a recent speech that he would work with Treasurer Kennedy and others to put the state’s checkbook online.

COST says doing this will only reveal what the state paid, not necessarily what it paid for. COST wants the whole story. And will keep pressing until it gets it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability insider corruption

Congress Hikes Pay!

Shocking news: Congressional leaders demand to be paid just one dollar a year! Thus they acknowledge their own flagrant irresponsibility in causing the economic crisis.

According to congressional leaders (and I quote), “Our mammoth fiscal irresponsibility is the single biggest culprit in all this, not counting the easy-credit policies of the Fed. We pretended we could spend and tax and regulate like there was no tomorrow, demand easy-loan terms to bad credit risks, etc., with no bad consequences. Just get something for nothing. Boy, were we wrong! Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!”

Yeah, right. That’ll be the day. Congress may demand that CEOs schlepping to Washington for handouts get paid just a dollar a year, but the congressmen themselves won’t even freeze their own pay.

Of course, many of them should be resigning. Instead, they have quietly, not to say furtively, allowed an automatic pay raise to go forward, the so-called Cost of Living Adjustment.

Representative Harry Mitchell sponsored a bill to prevent the automatic pay raise from happening in 2009. But it never escaped committee. As Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense points out, things are “wired so that you actually have to undo the pay raise rather than vote for a pay raise.” So add another $4,700 to the average congressional salary. Meaning they’ll make $174,000 beginning this January.

Because they’re doing such a swell job, right?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability initiative, referendum, and recall

Why the People

Some people wonder at my support for initiative and referendum. They don’t place much trust in their neighbors to run their lives. They fear what de Tocqueville called “the tyranny of the majority.”

And hey: I don’t trust fellow voters to run my life, either. But I trust voters to let me be free to run my own life more a lot more than I trust politicians.

Voters will choose less government more often than their representatives will.

And less government, in today’s context, means better government.

This was most notably demonstrated in late September. The U.S. House of Representatives voted on the Bush administration’s proposed bailout of the mortgage industry, the biggest takeover of private property in world history.

To politicians, it made a whole heckuva a lot of sense. To Americans who wrote and phoned Congress, the bailout appeared just as it was: a quickie, panic “fix” that merely lined the pockets of a sector of the investor population.

It was a subsidy, socializing risk while letting profit remain private.

Enough Americans notified enough of their reps to convince them to take a stand, defeating the bailout. The letters came in, ten to one against the bill.

Of course, the next week Congress voted in the bailout, adding injury, in the form of a bigger price tag, to the insult of ignoring constituents.

Once again, politicians ignored the people. That’s never good government.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability insider corruption

Corrupt Cooking

Can you be kicked out of the government for serving sautéed shad roe?

Prime Minister Samak Sundarave of Thailand has just been ousted by a Thai court for violating the constitution. His crime? Hosting TV cooking shows while in office.

Samak was the host of “Tasting, Grumbling,” and “Touring at 6 a.m.” After becoming premier, he kept doing them for weeks, until finally quitting the shows in response to political outcry.

Samak probably violated Thai law. But I can’t say I’m appalled by the spectacle of someone in the government also holding a legitimate private-sector job. And I don’t think the concept of “appearance of corruption” should be so elastic that it distracts us from recognizing and combating real corruption.

In the U.S., Senator Tom Coburn has been battling the loose and even corrupt spending habits of senatorial colleagues. He has also, as senator, continued working as a doctor delivering babies. Coburn has agreed to collect no pay for his work, but the Senate’s so-called ethics committee wants him to stop. Ridiculous.

I’m no expert on politics in Thailand. Perhaps Samak is verifiably corrupt — for reasons having nothing to do with mixing sauces on television. Opponents have also been gunning for Samak’s cabinet. Perhaps the complaint about his cooking was just a handy way to get rid of him.

But in my book, that’s the wrong way to cook up a scandal.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

McCain’s Admission

John McCain is a man on a mission. But it was his admission that Republicans in Washington have lost their way that jumped out at me as I listened to his speech accepting the Republican Party presidential nomination.

“I fight to restore the pride and principles of our party,” he told Republicans. “We were elected to change Washington, and we let Washington change us.”

Everyone already knows this. We’ve watched power politics triumph over principle.

But it was still nice to hear McCain say it. The first step toward solving a problem is to recognize you have one.

McCain went on to admit, “We lost the trust of the American people when some Republicans gave in to the temptations of corruption. We lost their trust when rather than reform government, both parties made it bigger.”

Oh, yeah, a whole lot bigger.

I began shouting about Republicans selling out principle early on, when, after Republicans took the House back in the 1990s, they quickly also took a dive on enacting term limits.

And the sell-outs just kept coming. Republicans traded their rank and file supporters for a bevy of big special interests.

McCain says he wants to take the party “back to basics,” vowing “low taxes, spending discipline, and open markets.”

That’s the right message. And McCain’s opposition to earmarks is to his credit. But are voters ready to believe it?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.