Category: national politics & policies

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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.

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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.

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

A Teachable Wage

The U.S. President wants to up the national minimum wage to $9 per hour.

Republicans tend to lose at such policy debates, sometimes by daring to tell the truth: That minimum wage laws tend to raise unemployment. But that doesn’t impress politicians, who can’t be bothered to look beyond the surface of such issues.

They present the minimum wage hike as a guarantee that higher wages get paid all around, that wages only go up, rather than what actually happens: some wages go up to meet the law, and others evaporate, as people are let go, jobs downsized, and new jobs go uncreated.

So why would congressional Republicans use the same old rhetoric to balk at the president’s plan?

Sometimes irony works. Republicans should take all the Democrats’ premises — we want higher wages, more wealth, etc., etc. — and up the ante:

“Yes, raising wages would be great! But why are you all such tightwads? Raise the minimum to $49 an hour! Or make the lowest rate comparable with congressional pay: $85 per hour!”

Then compromise and say they will only vote for the raise if the rate hike is a serious amount, not the president’s paltry $1.75 increase.

At that point, a more honest conversation will start up.

For the ugly truth is that the harmful effects of the current and rather low minimum wage laws rest mainly on folks who aren’t very likely to vote, or to notice why it is they are unemployed. But raise the rate to $49 per hour, or even $19, and the scam becomes obvious to all but the most dense.

Even Democrats would insist on a lower rate.

And then Republicans should demand that Democrats explain why. And reveal the perverse logic behind minimum wages for all to see.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government U.S. Constitution

Authorized, But in the Red

According to the late economist James Buchanan, there exist three basic categories of government functions: protective, productive, and redistributive.

The protective functions are most basic. As inscribed in the Declaration of Independence, we are to be protected by government not in a scattershot way, but by having our rights delineated and defended. Think courts and the military.

The redistributive functions make up the bulk of the federal government, today . . . according to a recent Heritage Foundation chart, “More than 70 Percent of Federal Programs Goes to Dependence Programs.” Most of these, like Social Security and Medicare, were not originally contemplated as tasks for the federal union, and are flagrant violations of the Constitution.

But some “productive” (business-like) functions were placed into the Constitution, the most famous being the authorization to create a postal service.

Though no longer an official wing of the U.S. Government, the Postal Service is still hamstrung by congressional micro-management, as the shrinking mail biz busies itself trying to erase red ink.

The current notion is to drop Saturday delivery of all but packages. The enterprise hopes to save billions on this reform, alone, and was able to initiate the service cut without Congress’s approval by gambling on what some are calling a legal loophole.

Perhaps as politically dangerous is the ongoing attempt to get rid of post offices in smaller communities, replacing them with “Village Post Offices” that private enterprise would run.

It’s worth noting that though the Constitution allows for mail delivery and a few other “productive” services, these aren’t very productive — at least, they tend to operate in the red.  Besides, what is authorized by the Constitution doesn’t mean required by the Constitution.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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incumbents national politics & policies

Gravy Train Engineers

A lot of big money in the Republican Party is now actively being marshaled to make sure that Tea Party efforts come to naught.

The latest endeavor bills itself the Conservative Victory Project, and has been written up in the New York Times, which relates the group’s intent: “to counter other organizations that have helped defeat establishment Republican candidates over the last two election cycles.”

You see, campaigns to unseat staid, big-government “conservative” Republican incumbents have not gone unnoticed amongst the Old Guard of the GOP. And these folks are worried about the quality of the gravy their gravy train returns. So they seek to shore up the “winners”:

“There is a broad concern about having blown a significant number of races because the wrong candidates were selected,” said Steven J. Law, the president of American Crossroads, the “super PAC” creating the new project. “We don’t view ourselves as being in the incumbent protection business, but we want to pick the most conservative candidate who can win.”

Law is, of course, thinking of several Tea Party candidates in the last election who blew it, Big Time. You know the ones: the candidates who talked weirdly of rape.

But it’s not just Tea Party Republicans who shoot themselves in the proverbial foot, or place foot in mouth. Mainstream “conservatives” blow it, too, as Grover Norquist pointed out in the Times article. “People are imagining a problem that doesn’t exist,” said Grover.

I worry that “the real problem” Law and his cronies (such as Karl Rove) are fighting is the specter of a successful Tea Party contingent, with Rand Paul at its lead. Real change is awfully frightening to the whip hands on the gravy train.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies responsibility

Bankruptcy, Not Bailouts

America’s bailout economy started many administrations ago, but really went Big Time under President George W. Bush . . . and then went Enormity Time with President Barack Obama.

The Washington Post provides the latest in bailout news by noting an inter-departmental squabble:

The Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program said Treasury approved all 18 requests it received last year to raise pay for executives at American International Group Inc., General Motors Corp. and Ally Financial Inc. Of those requests, 14 were for $100,000 or more; the largest raise was $1 million.

Though this is all quite scandalous, don’t expect policies to change or heads to roll — barring a joint Tea Party/Occupy uprising. The nature of the modern “regulatory” state is clear: government bureaus are quickly captured by the industries they aim to regulate. It’s an old story. The revolving door between business and bureaucracy is as well-established as between journalism and politics.

So why do we have bailouts?

  1. They show that politicians are “doing something”;
  2. They mimic the welfare state logic of “helping the poor” (if, with caustic irony, by stuffing the wallets of the rich);
  3. They aggrandize the showy machinations of the legislative and executive branches at the expense of the branch of government designed to handle massive business failure, the courts.

Perhaps Americans shouldn’t have voted in either an MBA grad (Bush) or a constitutional lawyer (Obama). Maybe what the country needs is a bankruptcy lawyer in the White House.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.