Category: responsibility

Categories
responsibility too much government

Dream Weavers

“It’s time to retire the American Dream,” writes The Washington Post’s Robert J. Samuelson, “… to drop it from our national conversation.”

Not so fast. The ability to stand on one’s own two feet, to make a living and a life for oneself and one’s family, to be financially and otherwise independent — that dream is still absolutely relevant.

And should be achievable beginning from any station in adulthood.

Samuelson is correct, though, to worry that the dream is becoming “an informal entitlement.” The “pathways to the Dream” constructed by government “often led to dead ends.”

“True, homeownership is a laudable goal; it stabilizes neighborhoods, for example,” he writes. “But the promotion went overboard. Lax lending standards lured people into buying homes they could not afford, contributing to the 2007-​09 financial crisis.”

Samuelson also thinks that “it made sense to subsidize loans allowing more students to go to college” because a college degree “meant better jobs,” but recognizes that the cost of college shot higher and many students ended up “with heavy debts and no degree.”

So you see where the problem really lies. As Henry David Thoreau wrote a century and a half ago, “The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.”

The American Dream isn’t to have government fulfill all our dreams. It has a more modest role.

Making our dreams come true is our job.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture responsibility

Custom and Customers

Muncie’s Traci Markcum remembers when the news was free. The Indiana citizen wants a return to those carefree days.

“I think it is pretty bad The Star Press is trying to charge people to read the paper online,” she wrote in a letter to the editor. “Whatever happened to being able to see the news on the Web for free?”

Free? Well, you can find plenty of news on the internet for free, sorta, once you’ve bought a computer and Internet access — and paid the electric bill, of course. In the really olden days, before cable TV, network news was free once you had a TV set. (Why computer and television manufacturers, internet providers and electric companies dare to charge us money, when we’re simply being good citizens and keeping up on current affairs, I’ll never know.)

Ms. Markcum “used to buy the Sunday paper and would read the news at work or on the go on [her] phone, but not now.” Not now, because The Star Press has “stooped to a new low by having to charge Muncie citizens who live and work in the city a fee to read something. Your paper prices have increased and people cannot afford to get the paper.”

In fact, Markcum became so desperate, she asked, “Are we supposed to start stealing the news you are supposed to be providing?”

Paperboys beware!

“Go back to the way it used to be, or lose a lot more customers,” she concluded.

Customers? A customer “purchases a commodity or service.”

For its part, The Star Press tells online visitors to “Enjoy a limited number of articles over the next 30 days” offering a button to “Subscribe today for full access.”

Oh, the humanity!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies responsibility

A Loan of Common Sense

If you give something that belongs to you, without expecting to get it back, that’s giving. You just hand over a gift and forget about it. Perhaps you would appreciate a “thank you.”

If you lend to someone, you expect to be repaid. Those who don’t repay are called deadbeats.

If you mug somebody on the street and grab his wallet, you are stealing. You are then a thief, a robber.

That’s all straightforward enough. This is not: Say that you steal from the productive citizens of one country or countries (Country or Countries A) and give the dough to the fiscally irresponsible government of another country (Country B), and you call it a loan. But when Country B can’t pay the installments, it is provided another loan originating in the wallets of the very same Country A citizens from whom was extracted the original loan.

What is this? You are not only stealing, you are shuffling IOUs instead of getting repaid. You are also misrepresenting the nature of the transactions, for it is clearly a gift of stolen money and not anything voluntary, like a loan.

Bill Wilson, President of Americans for Limited Government, goes into a bit more of the nitty and gritty of Greece’s tricky tranche of “repayment” on its “loan” from the European Union, and relates it to the similar finagling here in the United States … which all rests on credit expansion by the Federal Reserve. “The eggheads in Washington, D.C.,” he says, offer only one solution: “just keep digging.”

But how deep? At some point it gets too hot down there.

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.

Categories
folly responsibility

The Stockton Bust

Stockton, California, had seen a flurry of new home projects right up till the mortgage market crash. But, boy, did that come to a screeching halt. The crash led to foreclosures, which led to lower revenues from property taxes for the city. And though the city tried some spending cuts, they haven’t been enough. The Stockton City Council just voted, six to one, to seek federal bankruptcy protection.

Reasons for the bankruptcy, however, are not confined to reduced revenues. Add “soaring pension costs” and “contractual obligations” to the list of disaster factors.Stockton Bankruptcy - an illustrative image, not a photojournalistic artifact

And it’s pensions and medical insurance that make up the elephant’s share of “contractually obligated” must-​pays. We’ll see if official bankruptcy will allow the city to get out from under that mess. The Chapter 9 plan includes dropping medical benefits for currently fully-​covered retirees.

Who’s to blame? Politicians who negotiate really cushy deals for their (our) employees. The contracts obligate future taxpayers to pay out huge pensions for future retirees, rather than being funded (through insurance and investment) at the time of salary disbursement. The problem is that politicians love to make promises others must keep. Specifically, in this case, they contract defined benefit pensions not defined contribution pensions.

It makes no sense to do this, of course. It encourages irresponsibility, and is (to use a buzzword that should be used often against its usual purveyors) unsustainable. As proven by the Stockton bankruptcy.

Stockton is, so far, the largest American city to go belly up. We can expect further such busts, since the cause of Stockton’s problems — under-​funded pensions coupled with full-​coverage, gold-​plated, lifelong health insurance for government retirees — remain endemic throughout the country.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets responsibility too much government

Legislating Only Profits

J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon testified before the Senate Banking Committee yesterday about the $2 billion in trading losses suffered by his company’s London office last month.

Congress is shocked that money can be lost trading derivatives. And our legislative leaders seem to seriously think they can write rules for banks and other financial institutions that protect everyone from such losses, making certain any trading in financial securities is guaranteed to earn a profit.Jamie Dimon

“We will lose some of our shareholders’ money,” Dimon acknowledged, “and for that, we feel terrible. But no client, customer or taxpayer money was impacted by this incident.” In fact, J.P. Morgan Chase is nonetheless expected to turn a profit this quarter — as it has consistently done since the financial crisis.

Still, some politicians and policy makers fear the nation’s largest bank is “too big to fail,” that a collapse could again threaten the stability of the entire economy.

I liked what Rob Cox of Reuters TV’s Fast Forward urged Dimon to tell the senators: “We are not going to fail, but if we do, the failure will be our own. We will bear it on our bond holders, our investors and it will not be a public problem.”

Cox went on to endorse “this idea that banks can go out and they can lose money and they can make money,” adding that “at the end of the day it’s their money, not our money, that’s at risk.”

In other words, no bailouts.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.