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Category: porkbarrel politics
Washington Government is broken. Everyone — even those limited to a single firing brain synapse — knows as much. But, what to do about it?
Washington scribe Ezra Klein offers “The 13 reasons Washington is failing,” on The Washington Post’s “Wonkblog.”
First on Klein’s list? Earmarks. Really. Yes, the little pork-barrel items stuffed into bills without any debate or serious consideration to boost an incumbent politician by a million or a billion dollars here or there. Klein blames the GOP House for banning earmarks.
“It used to be that Boehner could ask a member to take a tough vote and, in return, help him or her get a bridge built back home,” explains Ezra. “That bargaining chip is gone.”
Our political system desperately needs it back, so we can put the genie back in the Klein bottle. Congressional leaders simply must be able to keep your representative on the take.
But that’s not all. Government is also too transparent, or, as Ezra puts it, “Too much sunshine can burn.”
Sure, effective political bridge-trading needs to be done behind closed doors. Away from the prying eyes of pesky voters.
Klein goes on to lament that, “Big business has lost a lot of its power over the Republican Party.” That’s a problem. Really. Progressives are nonplussed.
And Klein argues “The Republican Party has become particularly extreme” and “Ted Cruz (and others like him) has gained a lot of power over the Republican Party,” before informing readers: “There is no ‘Republican Party.’”
All of which — obviously and unquestionably — explains why Big Government cannot give us nice things. Or so says one insiders’ outsider.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
It’s a dam shame.
There are plenty of private sector dams in the U.S., but the biggest are federal government projects, like those on the Columbia and Colorado rivers. These government-run outfits aren’t “free,” though. Indeed, they often prove to be good examples of typical government operations, providing special favors to some people at the expense of others.
Take the Hoover Dam, cherished as the nation’s highest symbol by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. The dam supplies water and electricity to Las Vegas, Nevada — at cut rate prices. A typical family in Las Vegas pays half for water what the same family would pay in Atlanta, Georgia, despite the fact that Atlanta gets 13 times more precipitation. These cheap rates have predictable consequences — overuse, for one. Which then leads local water authorities to foist on consumers some heavily intrusive conservation rules.
Andrew Wilson, in a report for the Property & Environment Research Center, writes that “A market-ready solution for Las Vegas water,” though not often talked about, would have far fewer negative consequences. And it’s not a difficult idea as such: “discard the historic cost-based pricing model and move instead to a pricing system that recognizes the scarcity value of water.”
Raising the prices for water and electricity to Las Vegas (and, for that matter, electricity to favored Bonneville Power Administration customers in the Pacific Northwest — along with many other federal government “business” products) would not only help forestall shortages and draconian lawmaking, it would be equitable. There’s no reason for the rest of the country to be, in effect, subsidizing Sin City.
Or any other city.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
It’s hard to push string. That’s something the marionette masters in Washington are finding out. They’re used to dangling money in front of people. Watch the puppets leap!
But dangling money in front of folks in turn for votes and donations, that’s one thing. Investing in business? Quite another.
You see, businesses serve customers. While government can, indeed, invest in business, that investment doesn’t ensure success.
Developing and offering products on the market that people want to buy — that makes for success.
No matter how nifty something may seem to the investor, if it’s too costly for the targeted consumer — or simply fails to spark consumer fire — the company will not make a go of it, no matter how progressive the government doing the investing.
Sunday’s bankruptcy filing by Beacon Energy, a maker of an innovative flywheel electric energy storage system — energy storage being awfully important for that dubious future where we must rely more on unreliable and uncontrollable sources of energy, like wind and solar — is just another in a long history of failed government investments. In this case, other investors failed to come through.
On the bright side, this time the $43 million in loan guarantees, similar to those pushed to now bankrupt Solyndra, came with better collateral. Thus, this failure didn’t leave quite as big a hole for taxpayers.
Politicians like investing other people’s money (ours) … with their own political strings attached. But they hate that those strings lead right back to them when their corporate puppets wind up dead.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
According to Adam Gopnik, at the New Yorker, many of my readers and I hate cathedrals.
Well, he alleges that we oppose “beautiful new airports and efficient bullet trains” (not cathedrals, exactly) for the same reason that “seventeenth-century Protestants hated the beautiful Baroque churches of Rome” — as “luxurious symbols of an earthly power they despised.”
Hmmm. Disagreeing with Gopnik is a hate crime?
Americans have more than enough cause to oppose big, intrusive government. We know how it works (often not very well), we know how unfair it is (often quite unjust), and we have a traditional alternative ready at hand (Constitutional liberty).
Cluelessly, Gopnik just sees a pig-headed hatred of government that leads to a hatred of some really nifty things.
He should reconsider. Perhaps what we have is a love of liberty and justice. And that precludes some nifty things from being conjured up in certain ways.
I bet Gopnik agrees. Go back to something like a cathedral. Take Teotihuacan. The Aztecs sure made some impressive buildings. Big public works projects. But for the purposes of blood sacrifice? At the cost of constant imperial warfare and imperial rule?
No.
Same with some dream projects. No doubt taking a billion-dollar train to a trillion-dollar airport would be cool. But I’d rather spend my money in other ways. And is it really right to tax somebody else for my luxuriant transports?
No more than robbing Peter to pay Paul … even to build a cathedral.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Categories
Monuments to Megalomania
Some reform proposals are so modest they have scant hope of passing. Why? Because the people who pass the bills are so immodest.
Congressional egos would be severely bruised if Representative Michael McCaul’s proposal were enacted. His bill would prohibit lawmakers from erecting monuments to themselves glorifying the fact that they have dedicated huge amounts of taxpayer dollars to the erecting of monuments to themselves.
McCaul says that these “monuments to me” are emblems of arrogance and “contribute to both political corruption and excessive spending.” Such contributions are prolific.
Remember Senator Robert C. Byrd (1917 – 2010), “serving” in Washington for more than half a century? Well, the construction industry in West Virginia sure does. Wikipedia devotes an entire entry just to listing the buildings and transportation and other projects named after the self-aggrandizing Senator Byrd. He was always eager to lug as much pork to his state as he could, and most of it is stamped with his immortal cognomen. There’s even a Robert C. Byrd highway to nowhere. A Wall Street Journal article by William McGurn gives a laundry list of other sites named after congressmen alive and in office when their names got slapped on.
The ban should be enacted. Even if this reform is small and symbolic, the abuse it addresses is real. And McCaul wants to know: “If we can’t do the little, obvious things, how are the people going to trust us on the big ones?”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.