Category: Accountability

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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Tags ballot initiative, democracy, government waste, Kansas City

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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Tags debt, economics, Social Security, solvency, The Nation

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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Tags crime, gun, guns, law, responsibility, self-defense, terrorism

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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Tags debt, deficit spending, federal debt, federal spending, government spending, tax, tax policy

Accountability folly government transparency national politics & policies

Democrats’ Own Private Government

Post author By CS Admin
Post date October 7, 2015
2 Comments on 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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Tags 2016 Presidential race, Chicago, Chicago Tribune, Hillary Clinton, Presidential campaign 2016, Rahm Emmanuel, transparency

Accountability Common Sense term limits

Coming to Terms with A Logical Fallacy

Post author By CS Admin
Post date September 24, 2015
3 Comments on 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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