Category: national politics & policies

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Accountability national politics & policies too much government

Sequester Squeezes Solons

The deep, excruciating pain inflicted by the infamous sequester’s automatic $85 billion in spending cuts is beginning to crush the spirit of our glorious leaders.

Every stroke of the pen hurts, as congressional budgets are slashed a mindless 8.2 percent. The resultant chaos, we are told, presents a fatal threat to our survival as a nation.

A recent Washington Post exposé revealed more than a few of the budget-cutting horrors:

  • Congressional offices are wantonly canceling magazine subscriptions. Magazines contain important facts desperately needed by those entrusted with governing every aspect of our existence. Denied essential reading material, national literacy levels could plummet.
  • Communication between congressional representatives and their constituents is being disrupted as offices increasingly respond through low cost e-mail, instead of mailing through the more expensive U.S. Post Office.
  • Foreign junkets are also getting scrutinized. For instance, the congressional delegation sent to Rome to welcome the new pope dared the indignity of flying commercial.

It has gotten so bad that U.S. Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.) was forced to actually look into the phone bill paid by his congressional office. He found he could save $200 a month.

The sickening reality of budget cuts? They always hit our poor leaders hardest. But somehow, without magazines or lavish junkets, forced to use email and fly commercial and occasionally peruse a bill, our solons bravely carry on.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies too much government

“Good” Civilization-Destroying Intentions

Should we surrender our industrially fueled civilization the better to fuel fantasies of appeasing Gaia, goddess of the Earth?

The New York Times urges the Obama administration to block a much-needed oil pipeline from Canada as a gesture toward deflecting the purported threat of anthropogenic global warming.

“In itself, the Keystone pipeline will not push the world into a climate apocalypse,” admits the editorial. “But it will continue to fuel our appetite for oil and add to the carbon load in the atmosphere. There is no need to accept it.” The oil drops add up. “At the very least, saying no to the Keystone XL will slow down plans to triple tar sands production from just under two million barrels a day now to six million barrels a day by 2030.”

That’s what we want, right? Less and less of the fuel we need to go places and do things?

But if government is justified in blocking the Keystone pipeline on such a basis, isn’t it also warranted in stopping existing oil production?

What offends the “greens” is every form of “raping of the earth” for mere human survival and comfort — including to protect ourselves against weather that has always been variable, often extremely so. By their logic, the only moral way to defend against the elements is to surrender to them. No more building houses, wearing coats, adding gas to heater tanks and car tanks. Shut everything down.

I can’t say I’m persuaded.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets national politics & policies

Twinkies in Zombieland?

Hostess is dead. The bakery company stopped production in November, and has been trying to sell off its divisions since. Lucky for folks like Twinkie-obsessed Tallahassee, played by Woody Harrelson in Zombieland (2009), the much-beloved synthetic pastries may again appear in stores this summer.

And not as a zombie product, but as the real, edible confection we’ve known all our lives.

How? Not through any demented reanimation or infection process. This has nothing to do with zombies.

Instead, it has everything to do with the normal workings of capitalism:

In a joint bid, Metropoulos & Co and Apollo Global Management are paying $410m (£275m) for the bankrupt company.

The offer had originally been planned to set the floor for an auction, which Hostess boss Greg Rayburn had predicted would be “wild and woolly.”

In fact, a court filing showed that no other offers were submitted.

In America, today, it’s still possible for bankrupt companies to sell off their productive capacity — including names, recipes, logos and the like — to meet the debts prioritized by the courts.

The latter is entirely natural, not Zombieland-horrific.

Much of the hysteria over “too big to fail” comes from misunderstanding the nature of the deaths of once-successful businesses. Laid-off workers can and do find new work as more efficient companies step in, and the capital goods of a bankrupt company can still have value, and can be bought and re-employed more efficiently in other companies.

Indeed, keeping inefficient firms going by subsidy and special favor puts them into a zombielike existence — not the Zombieland re-animated dead kind, but pre-Romero, old-fashioned voodoo zombies. These sluggards serve slowly and creepily.

Better acclimate ourselves to capitalism’s “circle of life” than the horrorshow that is “too big to fail” in the United States of Zombiel… Bailouts.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability national politics & policies U.S. Constitution

Droning On?

For my birthday, Sen. Rand Paul started a filibuster.

I jest. The junior senator from Kentucky had something more important than my big day on his mind: the U.S. Constitution.

At 11:47AM, Sen. Paul took the floor: “I rise today to begin to filibuster John Brennan’s nomination for the CIA. I will speak until I can no longer speak. I will speak as long as it takes.”

I didn’t watch all of his endeavor (yet). What I did catch was amazingly eloquent.

It was also very specific. The Kentucky senator had asked candidate Brennan not one but two substantial lists of questions regarding the drone strike program. He also asked the Obama Administration whether the president thinks he has the constitutional right to use drone strikes against non-combatant Americans on American soil. Brennan had answered well enough, but left the administration to answer for itself. Attorney General Eric Holder responded, later, evasively.

And so Rand Paul took to the floor. And spoke at length — without teleprompter. He was joined, later, by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden. And then some Republicans, including Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio.

Though Rand Paul’s office had started a Twitter hashtag, #filiblizzard. It didn’t take off. Instead, #StandWithRand became the international trending topic.

The world watched.

But filibusters have to end. About 13 hours in, Rand Paul did end it, though not before insisting that, with regard to our rights, compromise is very, very bad: “The Fifth Amendment is not optional.”

If this filibuster solidified that constitutional principle, what a present that would be — and not just to me, but to all Americans. And the world.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom insider corruption national politics & policies

No 75 percent Tax Hike

Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit blogger, is often sensible, always indispensable.

But his idea for slowing “the revolving door between government and business” would encourage government to do more of the bad things freedom lovers loathe.

Glenn says: “Political appointees in the executive branch should pay an extra income tax when they leave for high-paying jobs.” He wants a surtax of 50 to 75 percent, for five years, on all income greater than what the victims of the surtax had earned as government officials.

Even if lobbying were the biggest cause of outsized government — dubious — expanding government’s ability to impose strangling taxation ain’t the answer.

The tax would, first of all, be unjust in itself, among other things treating persons unequally under the law. It would massively penalize select taxpayers simply for having worked at a certain level in a certain branch of government. Penalize them not only for unapproved-but-legal conduct (lobbying), but for unapproved-but-legal conduct in which they might engage.

The tax would also be a horrific precedent. For one thing, why apply it only to executive appointees and not also lawmakers, judges, the president?

Indeed, such a tax would foster the notion that it’s okay to confiscatorily target the income of members of any group, not just former government officials, in hopes of preventing other disapproved-but-legal conduct. After all, lawmakers wouldn’t be calling up Instapundit to get approval of the next proposed application of his idea.

Back to the drawing board, Glenn.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

Video: Subsidies, USA

Politicians love to throw money around, especially to appreciative donors; and many, many businesses love favored treatment, and know how to show their appreciation.

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national politics & policies too much government

Free Money?

Monday, I lamented our deeply-indebted federal government’s policy towards the states: Bribery.

It busily borrows more and more money to entice our more fiscally sound state governments into dramatically expanding Medicaid spending to ever less sustainable levels. I also noted that several Republican Governors who were long opposed to Obamacare are now taking the bribes.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker isn’t one of them, but he appeared on Fox News Sunday to speak with host Chris Wallace, who said:

“As you well know, seven Republican governors have agreed to the expansion of [Medicaid] to 133 percent of the poverty [line] . . . And they say they’re doing it because of, if you will, free money. . . . [C]ritics say that your decision is, one, going to cost your state millions of dollars and, two, going to mean a lot of people in Wisconsin are uninsured.”

“In our case,” explained Walker, “we actually reduced the number of uninsured, we reduced the number of people on Medicaid and we actually saved a little bit of money.”

Wallace then asked if he feared Congress wasn’t going to live up to its end of the bargain.

“No doubt about it,” Walker responded. “Just for my cost to continue Medicaid in the state of Wisconsin, without any expansion, it cost me $644 million more in this budget. Thirty-nine percent of that is because the federal government under the Affordable Care Act and other provisions is pulling back on their previous commitments. That’s today. That’s without the expansion. . . . If Congress can’t fulfill the commitments they’ve made, I’m concerned about where they’re going to be in the future.”

Wallace then asked Governor Markell (D-Delaware), “why is it that he doesn’t trust Washington and you do?”

That question went unanswered.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies too much government

Bakers’ Bailout

Bailouts aren’t just for big businesses any more.

Just a few years ago the “too big to fail” argument meant spending trillions on financial institutions and auto companies. Now it appears that rewarding failure — indeed, outright perverse dealing — has a new and eager beneficiary: the federal loot goes directly to unions.

Well, a union, at least. The Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers & Grain Millers International, whose brinksmanship shut down Hostess, Inc., has former Twinkie techs pulling in money earmarked in a specific way:

This week, the Labor Department decided to shower Hostess workers with Trade Adjustment Assistance, a multibillion-dollar pork barrel program that was beefed up as a bone to Democrats, who were blocking passage of three free-trade treaties in Congress in 2012.

TAA is a lavish program doled out by the Labor Department for laid-off workers who’ve lost their jobs due to “global trade.”

Of course, those 18,500 Hostess jobs were not lost to global trade. They were lost to union pig-headedness. The AFL-CIO-affiliated union was warned that without some cuts, the company would go under. The Teamsters entreated the bakers’ union to play ball. But no deal happened. And Hostess went under.

If the union’s negotiation tactic appeared as risky as a banker’s credit default swap portfolio on mortgage-backed securities, it’s now proved to be as un-risky as the same. The union may not be “too big to fail,” but it appears to be “too well-connected to fail.” The Obama administration is intent on throwing money at the group’s outrageous folly.

And so we continue to reward idiocy, well into the 21st century.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies Tenth Amendment federalism too much government

How to Surrender Freedom

When in the fight for liberty should one give up?

Never. Contrary to deterministic notions of social change, there’s nothing inevitable or permanent about any loss of our freedom.

What then should we make of the words of Daily Debate scrivener Robert Tracinski? Noting criticism of Florida Governor Rick Scott for reversing his stand against the Democrats’ health care reform package, Tracinski, also a foe of Obamacare, asserts that the battle to either repeal or block it “was effectively over with November’s election, when Democrats retained the presidency and control of the Senate.”

A bad blow is not a permanent conquest, however.

Scott’s opposition was central to his 2010 campaign for governor. As governor, he led a lawsuit against Obamacare. After the Supreme Court’s anti-constitutional decision upholding it, he said he would keep fighting by declining federal funds to expand Medicaid.

Alas, Scott has now thrown in the towel. (We don’t know yet whether state lawmakers, whose acquiescence is also required, will similarly discard their drenched terrycloth.) Proponents of greater government hegemony over the medical industry crow that all other hitherto recalcitrant governors will, in the words of David Firestone, “soon knuckle under and do exactly the same thing. . . . By investing a relatively small amount of their own money to cover the poor, states get a huge increase in federal Medicaid funds.”

You see how the bribe to the states is made. Cave in to a usurpation, and some of the apparent increased burdens will be borne not at the state level, but by the already insolvent, debt-ridden, deficit-addicted federal government.

It’s a sick system. And I’m not talking about just Obamacare.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies U.S. Constitution

Drone Strikes at Home?

The main controversy over the current administration’s drone strikes program has not been about committing acts of war without a declaration of war.

It has not been about committing acts of war within the boundaries of allied countries.

It has not been about killing innocents.

And it has certainly not been about the reliability of information that gets to the president’s desk that might cause him to order a drone strike.

No, the controversy has centered on the killing American citizens abroad with drone strikes. Some people favor it, since the main American targets are “traitors” and “terrorists.” But many others balk: Without a trial, how do we determine their guilt?

The usual response to that? “This is war!”

But no war has been declared. And, ahem, our side often blows up people far away from any battlefield and in allied territory . . . including a 16-year old American citizen killed in Yemen for being related to his father, Anwar al-Awlaki.

This, however, is just the tip of the enormity. The language from the folks in the administration suggests that borderlines mean nothing to them. Which raises a big question: “What about within our borders?”

The administration has been evasive.

This disturbs Sen. Rand Paul. “What I’m asking is about drone strikes on Americans, on American soil. The president will not answer that he cannot do this. In fact, he seems to be asserting that he can do this; all he’ll say is he doesn’t intend to do this.”

Sending drones to kill foreigners, innocents as well as enemies, on allied soil, in secret, without any method of accountability, is the behavior of a rogue nation. To claim the same power  on our own soil? That’s tyrannical.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.