Category: local leaders

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Accountability general freedom government transparency incumbents initiative, referendum, and recall local leaders political challengers

Initiative Surplus?

Truth in Accounting, TIA, Financial State of the States, Sheila Weinberg, initiative, democracy

Only nine out of 50 states can pay their bills and meet their obligations; 41 cannot, barring major tax increases or spending cuts.

That’s what we learn in last month’s “Financial State of the States” report from Truth in Accounting (TIA).

Alaska is in the best shape, “with $11 billion in assets to pay future bills”; New Jersey’s in the worst, needing “to come up with $208 billion in order to meet its promised obligations.”

Sheila Weinberg, TIA’s founder, works hard to counter governments’ creative accounting. It’s trickery, really, which “would be considered criminal for private sector corporations.” One gimmick is “promising to pay employee benefits in the future, but not fully funding the benefits programs as they rack up obligations.”* 

Thankfully, TIA’s financial analysis includes items such as already-​made pension and healthcare commitments. 

Now, let’s expand the analysis, collating these findings to separate between initiative and non-​initiative states**:

  • Seven of the nine states with a “taxpayer surplus” — where government can pay its bills and meet its obligations — have the ballot initiative process. 
  • The 23 initiative states comprise 46 percent of the states. Yet, initiative states comprise a whopping 78 percent of financially healthy states. 
  • Of the 20 states carrying a larger-​than-​average taxpayer burden, 15 states (75 percent) lack the initiative process.

Granted, this represents a correlation between states with citizen-​initiated ballot measures and healthier fiscal policy, not necessarily causation. Still, I’m not surprised states where citizens have more say so are better governed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* “This short term fix allows governments to artificially ‘balance their budgets’ by not counting certain obligations as official debt.”

** There are 23 initiative states and 27 non-​initiative states. Two referendum-​only states— Maryland and New Mexico — are considered non-​initiative states, and so is Illinois. Illinois is considered a non-​initiative state, because its ballot initiative process is so severely restricted as to be non-​existent. Only one measure has ever appeared on the ballot. 

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Accountability crime and punishment government transparency insider corruption local leaders moral hazard porkbarrel politics

Interfering With a Sweet Racket?

Seattle, City Light, corruption, security, police, scandal, cronyism

One way for governments and enterprises to save money is to contract out some or all of their services. Towns, cities, counties, states — even the federal government — engage in such practices all the time.

It is really just outsourcing, as business lingo dubs it.* But, like any system for shifting responsibility away from direct management, it can be corrupted.

As Seattle citizens now learn, courtesy of Seattle Times reporters Mike Carter and Steve Miletich. 

It appears that Seattle City Light, the public utility providing electricity to the city, has been contracting exclusively with Seattle’s Finest Security & Traffic Control. For a half a decade. Despite there being direct competition from another firm.

The utility paid “more than $7.8 million over the past five years to provide off-​duty police officers for traffic control or security work,” the Times tells us.

The whole story came to light (no pun intended) when a new outfit offering similar services, but based on “gig economy” principles, sought to enter the market. Seattle’s Finest challenged the firm’s licensing, and, allegedly, directed abuse at the firm’s chief executive officer. 

A Seattle detective off-​handedly described the dominance of Seattle’s Finest “in organized-​crime terms — using the word ‘mafia’ — and said nobody would be allowed to interfere with it.”

The FBI has now been called in. 

Usually, local government may seem rather humdrum. But a lot of money can go through powerful, privileged hands. Things can get exciting. Terms like “murky” and “intimidation” abound.

Is this a surprise?

Remember: power corrupts; local power corrupts locally. 

Right there where we live.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* An economist, R. H. Coase, got a Nobel Prize in no small part for explaining why this sort of contract can work better than establishing a complete firm-​employee wage system.

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Accountability local leaders moral hazard national politics & policies term limits

Renewed Interest in Self-Service

Michigan, term limits, scam, reform

“Michigan’s strictest-​in-​the-​nation term limits law will force nearly 70 percent of state senators out of office in 2019 and more than 20 percent of representatives,” reports the Detroit News, “a mass turnover that is fueling renewed interest in reform.”

What?!! Could term limitation laws actually make our poor underpaid and overworked politicians vacate their powerful perches … even when they don’t want to? 

Heaven forbid!

Who could have foreseen this strange turn of events, whereby limits on the number of terms politicians can stay in office would mandate that politicians, having reached that limit, would be summarily cast out?*

Of course, that “renewed interest in reform” comes not from citizens, but politicians.

Oh, and powerful lobbyists and special interests. 

The paper continues: “Term limits remain popular with the voting public, but critics say Michigan rules have thrust inexperienced legislators into complex policy issues they may be ill-​equipped to address.”

Rich Studley, the Michigan Chamber of Commerce’s head-​honcho, argues that “experience really matters.” His lobbying outfit, “an influential business group with significant financial resources,” is working to organize a ballot measure to weaken the limits it has long opposed.

“Any reform plan is unlikely to extend or repeal term limits,” explains the News, “but may instead allow legislators to serve longer in the House or Senate.”

Come again? If legislators could serve “longer” than currently allowed, that would clearly “extend” the limits.

I smell a scam swirling around Lansing. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* The “mass turnover” consists of 26 of 38 senators termed-​out and 24 of 110 in the House. Yet, there were 25 senators and 34 representatives termed-​out in 2010, and the state survived.

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Accountability ballot access general freedom government transparency ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall insider corruption local leaders national politics & policies property rights Regulating Protest responsibility too much government U.S. Constitution

The Great Faction

great fiction, government, citizen, initiative, term limits, Paul Jacob

Politics isn’t a pretty business. 

Frédéric Bastiat called the beast it serves “that great fiction” not because it doesn’t exist — intrusive state power sure persists — but rather because what it promises cannot really happen: “everyone living at the expense of everyone else.”

What can we do? How do we counteract a game that is rigged to increase the insanity, not reduce it?

Last week I indicated one thing a minor party with that goal in mind could do: use its power of spoiling elections to change major party behavior, and thus give citizens a fighting chance to restrain governmental metastasis.

Cancer.

I also suggested “blackmailing” the major parties into setting up a system of voting that … ends the power to blackmail! I believe that system — ranked choice voting — holds many positives, not the least of which is ending strategic voting, wherein voters are tempted to “falsify” their own preferences and support candidates they might dislike. This is as corrupting to the citizenry as the Great Fiction itself.

Let’s hope a savvy minor party leverages the major parties, gaining reforms to improve the system. Regardless, we can all — independently — push two other limits on political power:

  1. term limits at all levels, and
  2. initiative and referendum rights in all the states, not just the 26 that have it now.

Initiative and referendum rights would give ordinary citizens the leverage to possibly restrain the mad rush to live at each others’ expense. With the initiative, citizens can gain term limits, which produce more competitive legislative elections and lead to fewer legislators captured by the interests loitering in the capitol.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability ideological culture local leaders national politics & policies political challengers responsibility

Crazy Like a … Spoiler

spoiler, GOP, incumbents, Republicans, Pro-Trump

Seven Republican members of Congress — three in the last two weeks — have announced their retirement.* The Democrats, needing 24 additional seats to gain a majority, see an opening.

Steve Kornacki, MSNBC’s national political correspondent, calls these seven “pure retirements.” That is, these politicians aren’t seeking another office, they suffer from no scandal, and are “pretty good at getting re-​elected”; they’re “just deciding to leave.” Kornacki notes that the GOP had eight pure retirements in 2006 when they lost the House, and the Democrats had eleven when their majority was destroyed in 2010. 

On his MSNBC program, The 11th Hour, an exasperated Brian Williams complained, “On top of all that, since down is up and up is down, Bannon [is] threatening to — to use the verb of the moment — primary incumbent Republicans! Which is crazy.”

Williams refers to Steve Bannon, late of the Trump administration and now back at the helm of Breitbart News. Bannon is now working, as CNN reported, with “conservative mega-​donor Robert Mercer, who is prepared to pour millions of dollars into attacks on GOP incumbents.” Incumbent Republicans thwarting Trump, that is.

“I don’t think anyone should be surprised,” remarked Ned Ryun, American Majority’s CEO. “It’s a natural reaction by the base to what they’ve perceived as a perhaps intentional inability to pass any Trump agenda items.”** 

Ah, more spoilers! This week we’ve talked about Libertarian spoilers; now, pro-​Trump spoilers. And, for years, non-​profit groups such as the Club for Growth and U.S. Term Limits have helped a challenger against an incumbent, and been dubbed dangerous to Republican hegemony for their trouble. 

Seems what connects all these anti-​establishment folks is a commitment to principle over power. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

*  The retiring Republicans are Rep. Sam Johnson (R, TX‑3), Rep. Lynn Jenkins (R, KS‑2), Rep. Ileana Ros-​Lehtinen (R, FL-​27), Rep. John Duncan Jr. (R, TN‑2), Rep. Dave Reichert (R, WA‑9), Rep. Charlie Dent (R, PA-​15), and Rep. Dave Trott (R, MI-11).

** Steve Kornacki responded to Brian Williams: “Absolutely unheard of for a nominee in either party to have that complete lack of support from Capitol Hill and then go out there and win the nomination [for president].… You have this element where all these members of Congress, even though it’s a president of their party on paper, don’t really feel they’re part of this presidency.”

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general freedom incumbents local leaders national politics & policies political challengers

The Reverse of the “Spoiler Effect”

leverage, politics, Virginia, Libertarian, influence

“Voter surveys have found the GOP-​controlled Congress,” I wrote last weekend at Townhall, “to be more popular among self-​described Democrats than self-​described Republicans.”

Why? Because Republican politicians are proving themselves unable — even unwilling — to legislate as they have promised. One word: Obamacare. And few dare actually cut spending on anything … though they campaign on something (mythical?) called “fiscal responsibility.”

This leaves the GOP open to challenge. By the party I mentioned yesterday on this page.

And that can prove disastrous for the Republicans, for our elections in these United States are not run, on the whole, on reasonable grounds. They are “first past the post” elections, where, if enough people vote for their most favorite candidate it ensures that their least favorite candidate wins.

In those races where allegedly “small government”/“fiscally responsible” Republicans are challenged by serious budget-​slashing Libertarians, the Libertarian candidacy can have the effect of electing a Big Government/​Pro-​Debt Democrat.*

Yet the actual political outcome of these challenges could be positive — yes, for the GOP. As I wrote yesterday, the Virginia Libertarian gubernatorial candidate seems to be influencing the Republican to be less of a “jail ’em all” Drug Warrior. 

When Republicans adopt pro-​freedom positions they’ll win more votes.

Moreover, this influence need not be ad hoc.

State Libertarian Party officials could identify the most critical issues and negotiate directly with state GOP officials: “These are our issues — if your incumbents vote correctly on these issues, we will not challenge them. But if not, we will take them out.

“And if we help elect Democrats, that’s on your head.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* There may be cases where the Libertarians — when focusing on issues such as drug legalization and peace — have cost Democrats elections. If so, Libertarians ought similarly leverage Democrats in those areas to improve their positions on those issues.

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