Category: national politics & policies

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

Listicle!

In education circles, “lifelong learning” is a mantra, a piety, a cliché. For the rest of us, it’s how we maintain sanity.

Take words. It’s worth learning a few new ones now and then. After all, with new words can come new insights. Mostly, it’s just fun.Listicle

Yesterday, I learned a new word: Listicle.

This gem courtesy of Jesse Walker with Reason. He blogged about a Cracked “listicle” entitled “The 6 Most Popular Crime Fighting Tactics (That Don’t Work).” If you are on the Internet (and, since you are reading this, you almost certainly are) you’ve seen plenty of “listicles.” These are articles constructed in the form of a list. They are very popular, often linked on Facebook, tweeted on Twitter. Walker defends his recommendation: “Don’t sneer. Many listicles are excellent. I’ll take the average listicle over the average op-ed any day.”

I’d never heard the word before, but I am certainly aware of the art form. The listicle in question was concocted by Robert Evans, and he makes some great points:

  • Drug Dogs Are Inaccurate . . . and Racist
  • Car Chases Are More Dangerous Than Criminals
  • Drug-Free Zones Keep Dealers Close to Schools
  • Red Light Cameras Are Killing People
  • “Dry County” Laws Increase Drunk Driving
  • Capital Punishment Does Nothing to Reduce Violent Crime

Walker excerpts the “dry county” prohibition story, which is well-reasoned. I’m against capital punishment, but not moved by Evans’s take on it. Still, a tip of the hat to his red-light intersection revelation . . . which I won’t quote, because, like the most popular listicles, this one contains a plethora of words that, were I quoting, would contain a superabundance of aster**ks.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

Bipartisan Blame for Auto Wreckage

President Obama often takes credit for President Bush’s worst policies while also averring that the economy hasn’t resurged yet because of his predecessor’s bad policies. I’m happy to blame both of them for the bad policies and bad results.

While campaigning in Ohio recently, Obama said we should pick him in November because he didn’t “let Detroit go bankrupt.”Auto Wreck

Financial writer Steve Conover points out that the car-czar idea started with Bush in the frantic last months of his administration. Also that the choice for dealing with troubled auto firms “in 2008-2009 was not bankruptcy versus no bankruptcy [but] between precedent-driven bankruptcy and White House-driven bankruptcy — rule-of-law versus rule-of-czar.”

Not every car company was going bankrupt back then and being “rescued” by the elephantine intercession of the federal government. GM and Chrysler were the special beneficiaries of that galumphing guidance. As were the auto unions at whose behest the usual bankruptcy procedures were bypassed.

Better-managed firms like Ford and Honda had circumvented the abyss. The reward for their hard work and foresight? Government-subsidized competition. Conover’s most basic point is that the only resource that can (and should) “save” any company from failing in the marketplace is “a sufficient number of buying customers.” The auto industry would have continued minus GM and Chrysler. People who wanted to buy cars would simply have bought cars elsewhere — from companies better able to supply their demand. And auto jobs would have moved accordingly.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies too much government

Against Debt

The federal debt is no mystery. It is fed by deficits. “Because the federal government has long been spending more than it takes in tax revenues, we now face a $16 trillion debt, an amount that has grown by $5 trillion in the last four years alone.”

That’s Richard Lorenc and Jonathan Bydlak writing in The Daily Caller. And they are not merely describing a bad situation. They are proposing a solution.

They formed a Coalition to Reduce Spending, and are encouraging citizens and politicians to sign their “Reject the Debt” pledge. The vow has some takers, most notably Ted Cruz, running in a close U.S. Senate race in Texas, with a runoff at the end of the month. Like all who take the pledge, he promises

  • not to vote to raise the debt ceiling;
  • not to borrow more money to pay for spending;
  • to support balanced budgets; and
  • consider all spending fair game for reduction.

Other candidates — from Minnesota and North Carolina as well as Texas — have signed on, and more likely will, as the campaign hits the news, gains fame . . . and “notoriety.”

Perhaps unlike the folks I talked about yesterday, supporters of this coalition and its pledge aim at the heart of the problem. So go on: sign the pledge. And press your favorite candidate until he or she does so as well.

After all, there’s a lot at stake.

The idea that politicians can just run up a tab indefinitely, and “feel no pain,” is absurd.

The pain is coming. The only question is: Do we act in advance to forestall some of it, or just let it hit us like a full ton brick-load?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies too much government

Cliff Notes

When the bus you’re in is set to drive off the cliff, what do you do?

Let off the accelerator, stamp on the brakes, steer clear. If the cliff cuts through the road ahead, stop. And turn around.

Unfortunately, though the U.S. is heading directly toward a “fiscal cliff,” half the folks in Washington want to speed up, while the other half think just a little deceleration will do it.Beware Dangerous Cliffs

Enter the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and its new newly launched project, the Campaign to Fix the Debt. According to this non-partisan outfit, “temporary patches” and “one-year extensions” will not work, not while the federal government amasses “trillion dollar annual deficits” and “borrows 40 cents of every dollar it spends.”

Economist Arnold Kling hazards that an honest debate about deficits and debt is not possible, and that a “bipartisan solution to the deficit has passed its sell-by date.” Further,

the “fiscal cliff” noise will drown out everything else after the election. My definition of “fiscal cliff” is running out of suckers willing to lend to our government at low interest rates. (We are closer to this cliff than you may think — look at how much of the debt the Fed has to buy.) But in Washington-speak, the “fiscal cliff” refers to the thought that the budget deficit might be reduced suddenly next year. Horrors!

My own fear is that this group is, in reality, just a bunch of politicians who will wind up pushing the old, tired mix of tax increases and spending cuts, with the “cuts” swallowed up in the CBO’s baseline annual spending increases.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

N.B. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s installment, when we look at a new group tackling this problem with greater gusto.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Wanting Too Much

An old joke runs something like this:

    “We lose a dollar on every widget sold.”
    “So how do you stay in business?”
    “We make up for it in volume.”

The lesson? Mere numerical productivity is not key to the success of any human enterprise. Adding value is key. Quality counts. And profit.

Tell that to Ezra Klein. He measures Congress by how many laws it makes. The current Congress has made very few laws compared to previous ones — Klein has a very nifty graph of this, see at right — so Klein blasts Congress: “there’s no session of Congress with such a poor record of productivity.”

But it’s not gross-weight productivity that counts. As economist David Henderson perceptively noted, what matters is whether the laws are good or not.

The more laws we’re encumbered with, the less their quality. Or as Cicero once put it: “The more laws, the less justice.”

Laws carry the weight of force, and force is the opposite of freedom, so the more the laws, the less the freedom. Further, it’s almost impossible to manage the huge bulk of the legal code, leading to bureaucratic drudgery both in and out of government, and mismanagement of resources everywhere. At best, we wind up with only piecemeal enforcement, which is itself a temptation for a common sort of tyranny, the prosecution of folks someone in power doesn’t like.

Note that graph. Each session adds to existing law. And unlike spending feeding debt, which is at least somewhat offset by revenues, these laws tend not to be the repeal of old laws. Graph the accumulation of laws, and it goes only one direction.

The wrong direction.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment national politics & policies too much government

Programs for Peace

Mayor Cory Booker of Newark, New Jersey, calls himself a “social media enthusiast,” and recently engaged Reddit.com’s public, for whom he clarified his stance on drug prohibition:Cory Booker

The so called War on Drugs has not succeeded in making significant reductions in drug use, drug arrests or violence. We are pouring huge amounts of our public resources into this current effort that are bleeding our public treasury and unnecessarily undermining human potential. I see the BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of dollars being poured into the criminal justice system here in New Jersey and it represents big overgrown government at its worst.

Yes. Recreational drug prohibition has been and continues to be a horrifying example of “big overgrown government at its worst.”

My only qualm comes with the good mayor’s next sentence:

We should be investing dollars in programs and strategies that work not just to lower crime but work to empower lives.

The biggest reduction in crime would come from ceasing to criminalize peaceful behavior; the biggest relief from the drug war’s horrific consequences would be the war’s cessation itself. People “empower” their own lives, through peaceful work and family life. Are more programs really necessary? Wouldn’t individual freedom and personal responsibility be enough?

We don’t need “big overgrown government at its best.” We need streamlined, accountable government . . . that protects all peaceful folk. That would be far better. “Bestest.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies too much government

EPA Won’t Stop Polluting

The Environmental Protection Agency is one of the country’s most dangerous polluters, striving to blanket our economic life in a suffocating ideological miasma.

The EPA’s poisonous ruling that carbon dioxide — “a colorless, odorless, non-toxic gas” — constitutes a “threat” to public health and the environment has been endorsed by the Obama administration and now the U.S. Court of Appeals in DC. If it is never rescinded, economic growth will suffer. Representative democracy will also suffer, given how Congress has been bypassed here.EPA, polluting

Just FYI, we’d be dead ducks without carbon dioxide. The notion that carbon dioxide is a pollutant must flabbergast all plants, which blithely use carbon dioxide as a critical component in photosynthesis, thereby making all carbon-based animal and human life possible. (Damn you, plants!)

Unproven assumptions regarding the extent to which industrial activity adds to greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide — even the extent to which the planet has warmed and will warm further, or to what extent any variation in average global temperature is even a special problem, let alone a catastrophic one — lie at the hemorrhaging heart of EPA’s hubris.

EPA officials suppose that they can smartly operate a globe-wide climate machine by increasing the expense or reducing the supplies of the fossil fuels that we use to warm our homes, drive our cars, operate our assembly lines. No, bureaucrats can’t centrally plan the earth’s atmosphere. But they sure can make it harder for people to survive and prosper.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies

The Realpolitik of Illusion

It’s a race against time. Obamacare is going into effect, piece by piece, link by link, yard by yard.

The idea when legislating big programs such as this is to push up as many benefits as possible early in the timeline, and shove the burdens as far down the road as possible. The strategy depends on enough voters noticing the benefits before the extravagant costs become clear. (And the full costs never become clear.) Once the program has been around long enough, the benefits will turn enough voters into special interests, and the costs will remain dispersed enough to discourage over-burdened taxpayers from fighting the inertial mass of the program.null

About the only thing that can go wrong is that the costs become all-too-clear all-too-soon.

That’s Nancy Pelosi’s realpolitik, as she honestly explained in her proud defense of “the health care law” (as if there were only one!):

We think the more people know about this legislation, you see it has changed even in the past week, the support for it has increased and as people understand what we all heard here today — how it affects their lives directly — that will even grow. So as I’ve said before, the politics be damned. . . .

That line, “the politics be damned,” is disingenuous in the extreme. The politics, here, is everything. And the Democrats have big government’s “home court” advantage, the illusions of interest-group cost-benefit analysis.

And against them? A Republican presidential candidate who had previously supported the same kind of law, supported by the same kind of illusions.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies tax policy

Fair is Fair

President Barack Obama is not targeting the country’s 99 percent against the wealthiest 1 percent. In a news conference, yesterday, he instead singled out the top 2 percent.

Even though they account for 46 percent of all income taxes collected, Obama says members of this group don’t pay their “fair share.” Meanwhile, the bottom 50 percent of income earners pay just 3 percent of income taxes.

Though the president readily confesses to being in that top two-percent, sadly I’m not. But hey, even if I’m not rich, this country is as much mine as any wealthy person’s. If tax hikes truly are necessary (and this is for the sake of argument — I do not believe they are), shouldn’t I be part of his tax-hike solution to our national deficit and long-term debt?

Even those making less could afford to hand over an extra percent or two of their income for essential government services, eh?

And why leave out the poor? A surcharge of $20 (or $10 or $2.50) a year — even if that’s only removed from their earned income credits or food stamps or welfare payments — would put their “skin in the game.”

We should all be in this together, so why didn’t Obama propose a solution that included sacrifices by everyone?

My guess: It has nothing to do with revenue, everything to do with November’s election.

Obama is asking Congress to extend the Bush tax cuts for everyone making less than $250,000 a year. But he seeks a mere one-year extension.

Why?

My guess is that the over-$100,000 cohort is next on his list.

But he needs their votes, first.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability national politics & policies responsibility

Get Off the Omnibus

“Not one member of the Senate will read this bill before we vote on it,” said Sen. Rand Paul, last Friday. The junior senator from Kentucky had received the 600-page monstrosity mere hours before, and yet the august solons managed to pass it by a huge majority before close-of-business.

The legislation tackled three big funding extensions — another grab-bag “omnibus” bill in all but name. Obviously a rush job, even with the short turn-around it was too late for the president to sign that weekend.

By Senate internal rules, bills are supposed to be delivered 48 hours before any vote, to give time for senators to peruse their content. “We ought to adhere to our own rules,” said Sen. Paul, who went on to note that 48 hours isn’t that much time to read and comprehend everything in a bill of such length.

Such is the chaos in the Senate, run, apparently, like a business set on course to fail.

In a perhaps quixotic attempt to re-insert some sense of responsibility in the underachieving outfit, Paul has introduced two pieces of legislation, one requiring a day’s wait for every 20 pages of a bill, before voting, another designed to prohibit bills on more than one subject.

Frankly, I’d rather require every senator who votes on a law to be present in the chamber while the law in question is read aloud.

And the “one subject rule” is the kind of thing that many states have, regulating citizen-initiated measures. What’s foisted on the people should definitely be yoked onto the Senate, which obviously needs an omnibus-load of tough “love.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.