Category: Common Sense

What is left to say about Congressman Gary Condit? How about, “Enough already!”

But no, it’s never enough. Not when a congressman is holding his seat with the ferocious resolve of a professional politician locked in on a lifelong career at $150,000 smackers a year, not to mention the perks and a gold-plated pension.

No, this guy isn’t planning to give up his job, his position, his power no matter what. Judging by his obtuse stonewalling on TV, Condit is saying, “Go ahead: Drag me, my family and the entire country through this sordid tale: I can stand neck-deep in open sewage longer than you can.”

Perhaps that’s the new Washington standard. Now, to add insult to injury, the Condit camp is saying that the congressman never denied the affair with Chandra Levy, you know, the one he won’t confirm. You see, it was his taxpayer-funded staff who told reporters there was no relationship. Mr. Condit, of course, had no idea what his very own staff was telling the media. You just can’t get good help these days.

Condit’s fallen so far that even fellow Democrats in Congress are no longer defending him. In fact, there is talk of removing him from the House Intelligence Committee. (No doubt a very small committee to begin with.) But Condit’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, explains why this scandal just makes Condit an even more effective congressman. Lowell tells us, “He’s probably the only person on the Intelligence Committee who can’t be blackmailed anymore.”

Now there’s a dandy slogan for Mr. Condit’s reelection campaign.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Several years ago at a news conference, a reporter got confused and thought I’d advocated term limits for the media, you know, in addition to politicians. I told him we weren’t advocating such limits for the press, but nonetheless he ought not mention the idea above a whisper for fear it would take off.

Today, there are term limits on 19 state legislatures and 38 governors, but, of course, there are no limits for the media and nobody seriously advocating them. Yet, there are self-limiters in the media. Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot is leaving Washington of his own accord, and sounding a lot like a citizen legislator.

Gigot says about our capitol city, “It is horribly seductive . . . there is no more parochial place in America. Most of the city’s intrigues, which can seem so compelling, count for little in the end. . . . I started out trying to cover Washington the way a foreign correspondent would, trying to explain the bizarre native rituals to the rest of America. But the longer one stays here, the harder that is to do. Covering the city can lead to tunnel vision that focuses on political tactics and trivia over substance. I’ve sometimes found myself falling into that trap, a sign that some distance is in order.”

Gigot concludes, “The imperative of the political class is to accumulate even more power. Politicians don’t arrive here corrupt, or at least most don’t, but the attraction of power is corrupting to all but the hardiest souls.”

Paul Gigot, lessons learned, is headed to New York to become editor of the Journal ‘s editorial page. Good luck to him.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Shocker! This just in from Oklahoma . . . the career politicians there want to kill term limits!

Oh, I know . . . big surprise, right? But the anti-social attitude of the career politicians still appalls me every time I hear tell of it. It seems career politicians are all in favor of electoral competition and suchlike, right up until the minute revitalized democracy threatens to loosen their hammerlock on power.

There is a new twist now in Oklahoma. You see, in virtually all the term-limited states, citizens have capped service at six or eight years. And when the career politicians in those states realize that they can’t get away with getting rid of term limits altogether, they often talk instead about “strengthening” term limits, as they call it. Often what they mean is extending the limits, say from eight years to twelve years.

Well, anyway, the twist in Oklahoma is that the politicians there already have their twelve years, and that’s still too brief a candle for the careerists. Twelve years is still not enough time to find the bathroom, they say. Oklahoma’s term limits don’t even take effect until 2004, but the careerists want to kill the limits right now, before they have a chance to get off the ground.

The politicians have friends in a group called the Association of County Commissioners. Apparently the county commissioners in Oklahoma would rather deal with the same good old boys they’ve known all along than have to contend with fresh faces and fresh ideas. But I’m betting Oklahoma’s citizens will make clear that the term limits in their state are here to stay. And maybe even could use a little trimming.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Do term limits help? I mean, do they really, really help our political leaders behave in a more responsible manner?

Well, my goodness they would have to, at least insofar as they show the door to the most corrupt careerists and make way for new people, more idealistic people. If you have some actual electoral competition in your democracy, that’s got to help some, don’t you think?

But is there anything more specific we can point to in the term-limits track record? Well, yes, there’s plenty. For one thing, it turns out that the state legislatures that have been term-limited for a while are now more willing to put a lid on out-of-control taxing and spending.

In an article for the Cato Institute, Michael New points out that term-limited legislatures in California, Maine, Colorado and Oregon have each enacted tax cuts that have surprised long-time observers. And the Montana statehouse, which has just seen a big influx of freshmen legislators, has passed a Tax and Expenditure Limitation bill that will be one of the toughest in the country if it becomes law. In Colorado, taxes were curbed by the same initiative process that brought term limits to that state, forcing the state government to hand back $2.3 billion to taxpayers over the space of just a few years. Colorado’s tax cut of 3.4 percent was the largest among the Rocky Mountain states, just as Maine’s 3.8 percent tax cut was the largest among New England states.

Term limits can’t bring tax limits all by themselves, of course. But gee, they sure do seem to help.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Onion pungency. Ornamental fish. Cranberry breeding. How to de-bone salmon.  Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against food. I just don’t think the nation’s taxpayers should be spending millions of dollars on onion pungency studies and anti-salmon-bone technology.

Our career congressmen no doubt disagree. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, over the past year our congressmen have splurged more than $1.7 billion on federal grants for just such academic projects, earmarked for the home districts of powerful legislators. In other words: pork. Something to serve up to a particular interest group in your district to help flavor the reelection bid.

Academic pork is, in fact, 60 percent fatter than it was just a year earlier. Can we be sure it’s pork? Well, let’s think about this. Nine of ten states that got the most grant money happen to have legislators heading up the relevant congressional committees. Meanwhile, nine of ten states at the bottom of the grant heap have no committee heads in their congressional delegations. This is the kind of pattern you expect to see when career politicians are putting personal careers ahead of the common good.

For example, New Hampshire wasn’t doing very well in the academic pork area until Congressman Judd Gregg became top dog of a subcommittee overseeing the Commerce and Justice Departments. Now Dartmouth is getting an $18 million earmark to study cybercrime and the University of New Hampshire is getting $14 million for a marine lab and a pier. Sounds fishy to me.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

It was time for a lesson. There’s so much demagoguery in D.C. about Social Security that The Washington Post decided to spend a whole page answering questions about it. But, in the process, this company-town newspaper may have clarified a little too much. For instance, they write, “So policymakers will have to decide whether it is more important to worry about people alive 20 years from now or 50 years from now.” Is this any way to run a retirement program?

Workers are each paying 12.4 percent of their income either alone or with half coming from their employers and the best we can hope for is that some other generation gets screwed over instead of us? If we really must pit one generation against another, what kind of society will we descend into? The Post goes on to say, “Some believe future generations will be richer and more productive, and thus able to afford the bill.”

But leaving future generations the bill for our lives is morally bankrupt period. Still, the idea is pretty darn popular among politicians who live by the Keynesian motto: “In the long run, we’ll all be dead.” As long as the collapse happens on someone else’s watch, seems they couldn’t care less. We don’t need to give our grandkids the shaft. If workers could control their own accounts, politicians couldn’t steal the money to pay for more spending on their pet pork projects. We could provide for a better retirement and leave some of the earnings to our kids and grandkids, instead of sticking them with the bill.

This is Common Sense . I’m Paul Jacob.

People say to me, “Hey Paul.” You’re always criticizing proposals for campaign finance reform just because they would violate freedom of speech and would even further squash political competition. Got anything positive to suggest? Well, yes, I do.

The way things are now, it’s illegal for any one person to donate more than $1,000 to a federal campaign before a candidate is nominated, and more than another $1,000 after the nomination. Who benefits from these tight restrictions? The gainers would have to be candidates who have a big money-raising infrastructure already in place. Candidates who have special interest groups already hustling to bundle contributions from their members to the candidate. Candidates who have lots of campaign assets already on hand and pre-paid, like franking privileges and office staff that double as campaign staff and so on . . . taxpayer-funded assets that sure don’t get counted as campaign contributions, no sir. Well, you see where I’m headed.

It’s the incumbents who get away with murder under the present system. If somebody with money wants to give a challenger a chance, he can’t just write a fat check. He must virtually become a professional fundraiser himself. The system helps incumbents, hurts challengers. My reform will solve this. I propose that we each be allowed to give any amount of money to any candidate we choose. It would be a lot easier for challengers to raise cash that way, that’s for sure. Yep. Let Americans contribute just as much as they want to whichever candidate they want, just as if we were living in a free country.

This is Common Sense . I’m Paul Jacob.

Long ago, America fought a war to throw off the shackles of oppression. Today we don’t have to resort to violence to combat the latest political insanity. But sometimes it does pay to be pushy.

Consider Tennessee. When legislators there tried to impose a personal income tax, Tennesseans had to act. But citizens don’t enjoy the right of initiative and referendum in that state. So they found another way to make their discontent known. Mostly, they drove around the capitol building honking their horns whenever their alleged representatives seemed on the verge of foisting the new tax. They also buttonholed legislators and shouted slogans.

This resistance has paid off. For the third year in a row, attempts to impose a personal income tax in Tennessee one of nine lone states in this great land still without one have been foiled.

Not without counter-resistance. Indeed, the police were openly partisan when things got heated, according to Phil Valentine, a radio talk show host who led the rebellion. “These were citizens opposing an unconstitutional income tax,” says Valentine. “[But the police were] dragging soccer moms out of their cars and handcuffing them. They gave out tickets to people for blowing their horns. . . . They tried to keep citizens out of the gallery though when a lobbyist or state employee with a pro-tax button showed up, they got escorted in.”

Many Tennessee politicians have criticized the vocal protests. Too intimidating, they say. But if they’re so dismayed by honking horns and angry petitioners, why don’t they placate the “mob” with a little more democracy? How about term limits and a citizen initiative process?

his is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Ever wonder if anybody ever really disagrees about anything on TV?

Oh sure, there are plenty of pitched verbal battles and angry comebacks. And on some shows it seems like a lot is happening because the host keeps interrupting and talks very fast and with a lot of authority, or at least a lot of rudeness. But the TV pundits tend to get mired in the minutiae of current controversies. What about viewpoints that challenge the very terms of the debate? Wouldn’t that be interesting to watch?

Yet, too often, chances for truly challenging discussion are just plain lost. For example, Paul Craig Roberts is a widely published commentator and former Reagan Administration official. He worked with the Secretary of the Treasury to help develop economic policy. In other words, a big name.

Recently, in his syndicated column, Roberts has been saying that sales and excise taxes are more consistent with freedom than the income tax, because sales and excise taxes lay no direct claim to a person’s labor. He also says that the income tax is slavery. And that politicians who try to clamp down on international tax havens are chasing after runaway slaves.

But isn’t this incredible? A former Reagan Administration official claiming that the income tax is the same as slavery! Certainly something to argue about and discuss. I mean, who is this crazy renegade from the establishment, and why is he saying such things?

But is Roberts on all the talk shows, debating this issue with Sam & Cokie? Nah. Let’s just rehash the latest phony battle between the Demopublicans and the Republicrats.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Hey, listen up. You may have heard of voice recognition software. The software is not quite up to Star Trek standards yet, but it can recognize ninety-plus percent of what you tell it at a normal conversational pace.

Most people can take or leave voice recognition software given its current capabilities. But it turns out that those with dyslexia can enormously benefit. Dyslexia makes it difficult to read and write words correctly. The voice recognition technology allows dyslexics to get a report or letter done cleaner and faster.

And seeing the words appear on the screen as they are spoken actually helps improve reading and writing ability over time. Marshall Raskind, a learning disabilities researcher in Pasadena, says that children often show improvement in decoding skills after just ten hours or so working with the software.

Isn’t the free market great? Not only can something like this be invented to begin with, but it can also be distributed, sold, funded and continually improved. And the people who need the help most have a chance to get it without paying millions of dollars.

So what’s the problem, according to some critics? Raskind says he has discovered that “many people view assistive technologies in general as a crutch, a way of avoiding a problem. It’s weird,” says Raskind. “It’s like seeing someone with a white cane and saying, ‘Rip that cane out of their hands and let them do it themselves.'”

Thank goodness folks with dyslexia are now able to show how well they can think, even if they have a little trouble decoding written symbols. Their critics should try it . . . thinking, that is.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.