Category: Accountability

Categories
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.

Printable PDF

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

 

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.

Printable PDF

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

 

Categories
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.

Printable PDF

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

 

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.

Printable PDF

Taxes Make Us Strong

 

Categories
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.

Printable PDF

Stubborn Beast

 

Categories
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.

Printable PDF

Gluttony