Category: national politics & policies

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general freedom national politics & policies too much government

The Tyranny Waiver

Democrats filled their 2000-page healthcare bill — rammed into law despite growing and vehement public opposition — with obscure but costly mandates. As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi confessed, Congress would have to pass the bill before we could learn what they were. After all, who, including congressmen, had time to actually read and assimilate the monstrosity?

Choke down first, chew later. That was the ordained (if unhealthy) order of things.

Now we suffer the consequences — at least insofar as we can’t wheedle special exemptions, loopholes, workarounds.

One provision of the new law boosts the minimum annual benefit that companies must include in low-cost medical insurance plans given to low-wage employees. Many large employers contend that the new costs would force them to drop many employees from their insurance rolls. (So much for the Obama lie that “if you like the insurance coverage you have now,” you’d be able to keep it under Obamacare.)

Federal officials have blinked on this issue. The Department of Health and Human Services and Disservices is now granting waivers to many organizations so that their workers can retain coverage. McDonald’s and a New York teachers union are among the employers receiving the waivers.

This is such a great idea, let’s expand it! Give waivers to everybody for all the tyrannical provisions of the new law.

What the heck, distribute waivers for every single tyrannical mandate that governments have ever imposed on us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture national politics & policies

My Enemy’s Money

American democracy is uglier than necessary. We don’t have to talk so nasty about our opponents. Or their money.

The usual snipe about this process is that funders of “our side” (whichever side that happens to be) are Good and True and Selfless, while funders of the other side are Evil and Dishonest and Selfish.

So, Democrats decry — and often seek to regulate — the spending of wealthy conservatives and “major corporate lobbyists”; Republicans decry — and, perhaps less often, seek to limit — the spending of unions and billionaires such as George Soros.

Because organizations like MoveOn have been funded by Soros, they are said to be somehow less “legitimate.”

When it was discovered that the Koch brothers of Koch Industries had funded various “Tea Party” organizations to the tune of (it is said) many millions, Obama-hurrahing pundits and activists decried this, charging that it proved that there was no “grassroots” element to the movement. “Astroturf!” they cried.

All nonsense.

Now, Democrats from Obama on down claim that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is using foreign money for ads. But Democrats haven’t produced a shred of evidence. It’s simply a wild accusation.

Look: It’s not tainted money when the other side gets it and you don’t. Or vice versa. Besides, rich people should be as free as less rich folks to give to their causes.

And perhaps we’d see less money pouring into politics from billionaires were campaign contributions for the rest of us less limited.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets national politics & policies

A Wealth of Joblessness

Did you know that the unemployment rate — as high as it is — is actually very much understated? It doesn’t include those who are out of work but have given up trying to find a job.

This puzzles me.

Oh, I see the rationale for not counting those who have abandoned their job searches (the information gets harder to collect and maintain, and you enter into the farther regions of statistics), but, nevertheless, they certainly do remain unemployed.

What puzzles me is the ability to remain permanently jobless. I don’t think my wife would let me make that choice. And even if she did, without income where would we get the money to pay the mortgage or buy food?

There’s unemployment insurance, which helps tide folks over when they lose a job. Yet, a condition for receiving unemployment benefits is continuing to actively seek a new job.

Like many, we could fall back on family and friends. But I’d feel bad enough about that if I was pounding the pavement every day in search of gainful employment. I can’t imagine doing so without any intention of landing a position and getting back on my own two feet.

So what can we conclude about folks who don’t have a job and aren’t looking for one? There are apparently a lot of rich folks out of work.

This yields the unwelcome-to-many conclusion that, in America, everyone is rich. Inequality notwithstanding.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

Going After the Gold

What does gold have to do with medical care? Ingested, it’s a poison. It’s not often used in treatment.

So why did the Obama administration place a provision further regulating the buying and selling of gold into the Democrats’ medical reform legislation?

Economist Thomas Sowell explains, in a recent column, why politicians are obsessed with the yellow metal. Before FDR, gold provided a check against politicians’ desire to spend the money government could “just print.” Because, in those long-ago days, paper dollars were backed by gold, Americans would cash the paper in for gold when it looked like the Treasury had gone on a printing spree. So inflation (the increase of the supply of money, and the consequent diminishing of its value, leading to increasing prices) was checked.

In 1933, FDR confiscated most of America’s circulating (and hoarded) gold, and Nixon took us off the gold standard completely in the ’70s, morphing our monetary system into a pure fiat (inflationary) standard.

Also in Nixon’s time, it became legal, again, for Americans to own gold.

So why make it harder, now, to trade in gold — when gold is not money?

Because investors, in times of inflation and crisis, turn to gold as a hedge. Against politicians, basically. And, says Sowell, “the Obama administration sees people’s freedom to buy and sell gold as something that can limit what the government can do.”

Gold, like freedom, “cramps the government’s style.”

That speaks volumes about gold . . . and “Obamacare.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


Categories
national politics & policies responsibility

Deficits Matter Morally

There are two things I don’t understand.

Actually, there are many things I don’t understand, but what I’m thinking about, now, is how one can honestly defend massive government deficits in one of the two usual ways.

The first defense became a cliché while I still wore footsie pajamas: Deficits don’t matter because we owe the debt “to ourselves.”

The truth? More complicated. Some people buy debt; others don’t. Were we to “forgive us our debts” (to appropriate a familiar phrase), we wouldn’t be forgiving what we owe “us,” but what the “U.S.” owes just those investors who’ve bought that debt.

And not even “everybody” owes the debt, since the taxes that would be collected, extra, to pay the debt might not come out of your pocket, or mine — it’ll come out of those pockets, over there. (Of course, you’re probably thinking, “I should be so lucky!”)

No wonder government debt is so tempting. On the surface it’s all inclusive. “We’re all in this together.” But beneath, it’s some folks trying to get one over on other folks.

Nasty, eh?

Then what about today’s excuse: “We owe it to folks overseas.” Since much of our governments’ debt gets bought up by investors abroad, we don’t have to worry about it because . . .

The unspoken thought is: “We’ll just renege on our promises.” Not pay it. Screw them.

Simple truth: Apologists for growing deficits flirt with mass theft from the government’s creditors.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

Demolition Time!

The socialist party of Hugo Chávez, President of Venezuela, expects to lose seats in the next election. El Presidente pled with voters to not forsake the “revolution.” He dubbed the opposition — which last time around boycotted the elections — “Operation Demolition.”

This is supposed to be a bad thing?

Surely what we hope for in an opposition party, in South America or El Norte, is, in everything but the incendiary, literal sense, demolition.

Of expansive, intrusive, know-it-all government.

“Big” and “intrusive” are just two words that characterize what the GOP brought to America during its heyday. Others? Massive spending, a new medical “entitlement,” growing public debt, and — as a sort of crackpot coda — bailouts for rich people.

Same for united government under the Democrats: More uncontrolled spending, an even more massively expensive medical “entitlement,” ballooning public debt — and, as a variation on a theme — more bailouts yet.

Massive government with no limits. But we’re told we can’t call it socialism!

Reports from Venezuela say the opposition has shifted from hatred of Hugo to issues such as rising crime and cost of living. In America, Tea Party folks have gained most ground when they attack spendthrift and socialistic policies rather than demonizing President Obama.

In both cases, ordinary people’s everyday concerns — taxes, debt, inflation, thuggery, and all the other things that go along with socialist-leaning policies — trump the cult/anti-cult of personality as well as political theory, expressed by this ism or that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights national politics & policies

The Ad Hominem Bias

Can you discredit an opponent’s opinion by demonizing the opponent or his or her supporters, rather than addressing the opinion itself?

The President recently spoke on the horrors of the Citizens United v. FEC decision, in which evil corporations retained (or regained) a right to support political speech. Obama hates the decision, but insists he’s no censor. What he really wants is to force supporters of political messages to disclose the financing used to promote said speech. Who it comes from.

The Disclose Act, currently working its way through Congress, aims to do just that.

The odd thing, as former FEC Chairman Bradley Smith relates, is that the legislation is, well, redundant. Corporations that spend money on political speech during final election blitz-time are now required to report their funding sources.

So why pile on?

Perhaps the President and his confrères see disclosure as less about information and more about blocking the message by taking up half of a 30-second television spot with the names of various corporate executives.

But the stated rationale bespeaks of an underlying belief that arguments for or against something stand or fall depending on who supports them. It’s the argument ad hominem all over again. Someone for policy X? If A or B supports it, that’s bad; if C or D supports it, that’s good.

And that’s a fallacy. And evidence of a certain simple-minded partisanship, giving voters less credit than they are due.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture national politics & policies

King’s Dream, Tea Party-Style

In the Washington Post’s Book World segment, surprise was noted how quickly Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe’s Tea Party manifesto, Give Us Liberty, fell off in sales. Why? Perhaps “Tea Party folks . . . already knew who they were and what they believed?”

Good guess.

But what do they believe?

Alveda King is the niece of Martin Luther King, whom she refers to as “Uncle Martin.” Fielding questions from CNN’s Larry King after she had participated in Glenn Beck’s recent Washington rally, Ms. King insisted that “It’s not so much about the man as the message.” The “issues” she emphasized were the ones that Beck, to the surprise of many, had also emphasized: Faith, hope, charity, and honor.

“My uncle said we have to live together as brothers — and I add, as sisters — or ‘perish as fools.’” If Ms. King is not out of place in Beck’s wing of the Tea Party, then what of all the noise about racism? Could widespread opposition to Obama be mainly about policy?

When Rev. Sharpton talked about “going all the way in civil rights,” Ms. King clarified something that might be useful in helping left-leaning folks understand Tea Party folks’ attitude towards policy: “My uncle was not teaching that we needed the government to take care of us.”

His main message had something to do with liberty. And respect for all.

Tea Party people appear to be in the main stream of modern American culture in claiming such ideas as theirs, too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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

Nothing Doing

When you don’t know what to do, the thing to do is nothing.

Well, maybe.

Economist Thomas Sowell, in a recent column, notes that we recovered from downturns in the economy more quickly before the federal government took it upon itself to fix things. The first major fix was with the Great Depression. Which dragged on and on.

Today, our leaders have spent trillions of borrowed money to fix the economy, with poor results.

Sowell’s column is great, right up until near the end, when his plea for politicians to “do nothing” ignores a lot of . . . something.

After the huge 1987 stock-market crash, he explains, President Reagan did nothing. But then “the economy rebounded, and there were 20 years of sustained economic growth with low inflation and low unemployment.”

But were those 20 years really so benign? Activity by presidents, by Congress and most of all by the Federal Reserve set up the systemic problems that led to the Crash of 2008. Consumer price inflation was low during Sowell’s Reagan-blessed period, but all the while the Fed was feeding first a dot-com bubble and then a housing bubble. And it engaged in a series of bailouts of financial institutions.

Maybe Reagan and later politicians didn’t do enough in the “do nothing” department. They should have reined in (or abolished) the Fed. They should have abandoned “too big to fail.” They should have stopped subsidizing creditors in busts and home-owners in booms.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall national politics & policies

The People Are Restless

Scott Rasmussen’s polling company, Rasmussen Reports, asks questions the establishment polling outfits don’t. For one, he breaks down his poll respondents into the “Political Class” and “Mainstream Americans.”

Last month, by Rasmussen’s criteria, 67 percent of people in the “Political Class” said the country is headed in the right direction, while 84 percent of “Mainstream Americans” said the exact opposite.

On Friday, Rasmussen Reports released polling showing that 71 percent of Americans support requiring a national vote to approve any changes Congress might make in Social Security. When it comes to raising taxes, 61 percent of us want a tax hike approved by Congress to go to a national vote to be approved or rejected by the people, with 33 percent in opposition.

On the issue of a national vote there is again a stark difference of opinion between the Political Class, which opposes a public vote on changes to Social Security (60 percent) or on raising taxes (73 percent), and Mainstream Americans, who support a vote on entitlement changes (78 percent) and tax increases (72 percent).

Rasmussen Reports has also been tracking something even more fundamental: Does our government have the consent of the governed?

The answer in July was that less than a quarter of us feel the government has that consent. This is actually up from February, but I don’t think that changes the big picture: Public opinion is undergoing a revolution. Rasmussen Reports is trying to track it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.