The debt limit is in the news again, so this satire, from a few months back, remains timely:
Category: folly
The Federal Reserve, our central bank, hit the news big last week.
Beginning in August 2007 and continuing for the next two and a half years, the Fed lent the world’s biggest banks something like $7.77 trillion dollars at the barely perceptible interest rate of 0.01 percent. With that money, the banks bought Treasury bonds (federal debt) and made $13 billion in profit.
I reported on this multi-trillion-dollar loan figure in December 2008, a few weeks after the biggest day ever of Fed bailout fever. For some reason this information didn’t become widespread or understood until this December, when Judge Andrew Napolitano and Jon Stewart made a big deal of it on their respective TV shows, after Bloomberg reported the profits banks made off all that bailout money.
What does this figure represent? To me, it represents the outrageous amount of magic money a sick and corrupt fiat-dollar/bailout-based system of moral hazard requires when it implodes.
I think we can all justifiably roll our eyes, now, when some rah-rah boy for big government tells us how absolutely necessary it is to have a central bank. The old gold standard never fell apart this badly. The gold requirement itself placed a huge check on out-of-control banking.
But a $13 billion reward for the biggest financial mess in world history? That’s the very opposite of a check or balance on risk-taking, greed, or downright stupidity.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Categories
Taxing Christmas and Common Sense
Joke writers received an early Christmas present this week when the Obama Administration announced plans to levy a tax on Christmas. Actually, the tax was not on Christmas, precisely, but on Christmas trees.
And not on all Christmas trees, just on real, “cut” Christmas trees as opposed to the artificial variety. Seems people prefer artificial trees. Sales of “fresh” trees have fallen significantly in recent years, while artificial tree sales nearly doubled from 2003 to 2007.
So, the folks at the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a 15-cent-per-tree tax on “producers and importers” of 500 trees or more. The money would go into an advertising campaign to promote freshly-cut real trees over artificial ones.
But is it even a tax?
“I can tell you unequivocally that the Obama administration is not taxing Christmas trees,” declared White House spokesman Matt Lehrich. “What’s being talked about here is an industry group deciding to impose fees on itself to fund a promotional campaign …”
But Jim Harper of the Cato Institute asked and answered the essential question: “Do Christmas tree farmers go to jail if they refuse to pay? Yes. It’s a tax.”
Once joke writers and commentators and real people (as opposed to the artificial variety) got wind of it, the tax/non-tax was scuttled with an announcement that “USDA is going to delay implementation and revisit this action.”
Don’t bother. As Robert Childress of the Texas Christmas Tree Growers Association posits, “I feel that marketing for my products is my responsibility …”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Categories
Pension Reforms Un-Ravel?
Jerry Brown has done some good work as California’s governor. When he promised to take on the common practice of pension double-dipping, he spotted a problem and appeared to be on the right track.
But if you want to hire well-connected, experienced and (therefore, or presumably, competent) civil servants to help you in your crusade to save your state, what do you do?
Why, you hire retired civil servants. They each get their salaries — plus their pensions.
There may be something faulty in the above rationale. But that’s what happened.
Shane Goldmacher and Patrick McGreevy of the Los Angeles Times showed just how big this problem is, in a current exposé. They lead with the facts in the case of Ann Ravel, who “gets a paycheck from her salary as chairwoman of California’s ethics watchdog agency and a second, bigger check from her public pension as a retiree.” She makes a good living, since the two sources of income “total more than $305,000 a year.”
This is not a good policy. Marcia Fritz, president of California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility, says such double dipping “violates the whole premise of having a retirement program.”
I see her point.
Still, it wouldn’t be an issue if pensioners received retirement payments not in amounts promised by politicians and guaranteed by taxpayers, but instead coming from actual investments — defined contributions, not defined benefits — in something like each one’s individual 401(k).
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Categories
A Brief Against Weiner
Congressman Anthony Weiner: Insert joke here.
Perhaps because I pronounced his name as “whiner” rather than “wiener,” I didn’t titter as much as the rest of America did upon the Twitter release of his notorious underpants photo.
Weiner stonewalled for as long as he could. Was the photo in question of his own dear, downstairs corporality? He couldn’t “say with certitude.”
Yesterday’s overdue confession that he’d fouled up a direct message on Twitter, sending it publicly, instead — and then lied about it — confirmed nearly everybody’s suspicions. (Everyone it seems except too many slanted lame-stream media folks, who instead attacked the now magnificently vindicated Andrew Breitbart.) Weiner admits to having sent inappropriate messages and photos to attractive, younger women.
But, alas, Weiner’s mea culpa was accompanied by his insistence that he would not resign.
For lying about his accounts being “hacked” — and thus cry-wolfishly raising national security issues — and for proving himself an utter idiot at a simple messaging system, he should. That is, he should resign for falsely reporting a crime (and it is a crime to hack someone else’s online accounts), and for utter, bumbling incompetence.
Demonstrating humiliating incompetence at Twitter should remain a prerogative of private citizens, not politicians.
And it’s not as if he couldn’t land on his, er, feet. He could join one of the newer news comment shows, become Eliot Spitzer’s new partner on, perhaps, Weiner/Spitzer.
It has a ring to it.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Categories
Expensive Cheap Energy
What is “green” energy?
There are two types. First, there’s photosynthesis.
Green plants sustain themselves through photosynthesis, creating energy for their own growth from the light of the sun. We harvest that energy pretty efficiently, with a reaper after most of the hard work has already been done. The sun is a great partner in this cost-effective form of “green” energy, as are carbon dioxide, water, soil minerals and harvesting equipment.
Then you’ve got your feel-good, ideologically motivated “green” energy, which needn’t be cost-effective at all! No matter how expensive creating this energy might actually be, the only thing that counts is whether participants in the process can declare that they are “saving the environment.” What difference, then, does it make whether far more money, and energy, is lost than gained thereby?
Such seems to be the notion behind the University of North Texas’s decision to install 36 “elliptical” exercise machines to turn the school into what the manufacturer, ReRev, calls “the largest human power plant in the world.”
The machines reportedly cost the school $20,000 and presumably required energy to build, pack, ship. But the machines also convert energy exerted during exercise to electricity at the rate of one kilowatt-hour every two days. A kilowatt-hour costs on average about ten cents in the North Texas area. So the cycling produces less than a penny of energy per hour.
But hey, at least it’s a workout.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.