Category: Common Sense

Whenever a career politician says the words “taxes” and “moratorium” in the same sentence, look for the candid camera and the whoopee cushion. You’re being set up.

I guess I was one of those fools who thought that a 5-year moratorium Congress passed on taxing Internet commerce had some teeth to it. But now I hear that there’s bipartisan support for a set of bills that would put the kibosh on that moratorium. Where’s gridlock when you really need it!

The Dorgan-Istook bill would let states regulate interstate commerce despite the trivial matter of the U. S. Constitution. Under that increasingly irrelevant document, state governments have no authority to tax or regulate interstate commerce. But the feds do have that authority, and allegedly they also have the authority to delegate that authority to the states by setting up this newfangled tax cartel.

Today, you can order stuff from another state by mail-order without having to pay that other state’s sales tax. Sure, retail stores think they have a bad break when they have to pay more of their gross income in sales taxes than mail-order outfits do. But the solution to bad taxes is to reform or get rid of them, not to make sure everybody everywhere suffers just as much as you do.

States actually have the power already to tax their merchants for out-of-state sales, but they know that doing so means businesses to other states. The proposed cartel gives states a way to eat their tax base and have it, too through a national tax cartel of states.

If this sounds awfully confusing to you, you might want to call your congressman and ask him to explain it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

There’s a problem. Relationships between career politicians and certain contributors are too cozy.

Take, for example, the seats on glitzy overseas “trade missions” that the Commerce Department hands out as plums to generous contributors. Senator John McCain says that companies going on these trade missions should accept a 6-month moratorium on campaign contributions.

Even Steven Moore of the Club for Growth, usually skeptical of McCain’s proposals for campaign finance reform, finds merit in this suggestion. As Moore puts it, “what’s the point of giving CEOs the royal treatment on chartered trade delegation trips, and placing them in the first-class aisle seats, if you can’t shake them down for money soon thereafter? It’s basically a cash-in, cash-out system. It reeks to high hell.”

True enough. But in my view, McCain’s proposal is just spray-paint on the same old scam. Before and after that six-month period, you’ll still have politics as usual, only more fast and frantic.

Instead of laying a coat of superficial respectability on a scam that shouldn’t be happening at all, let’s stop the scam. Stop the trade missions. You don’t need to send companies overseas at taxpayers’ expense to lower trade barriers. And if the goal is to scout new markets, well, profit-seeking firms can pay for the airline tickets themselves.

No amount of regulation will stop people from going after big favors bestowed on them by politicians, so long as the politicians are still allowed to bestow those favors. So let’s put a stop to the taxpayer-funded favors.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Now and then somebody who’s been in the thick of political wheeling and dealing will give us the real scoop about what’s going on out there in the hallowed halls of power.

Too many political memoirs treat politics as usual as some kind of unalterable law of nature. There are some noble exceptions: John Jackley’s Hill Rat, Mark Sanford’s The Trust Committed to Me.

And now former Congressman Tom Coburn is about to add to their number. Like Sanford, Coburn was a term-limited representative who voluntarily left his job in Washington after three terms. The book isn’t finished yet, so we don’t have many details about what will be in it, but we know what the straight-talking Coburn has said in the past.

For example, he has bluntly noted that the power folks wield in Washington is, quote, “like morphine. . . . People give you positive strokes when you don’t deserve them. It takes a very strong individual to recognize when you’re getting [what] you don’t deserve and not let it go to your head.”

Coburn jumped into the battle to begin with because he was “disgusted with Congress,” as he puts it. “I was disgusted with my congressman. He’d been here 14 years. When he left [for Washington], he was a great congressman. He represented the views of the district. At the end, he represented the views of Washington.”

Coburn says the desire for power is “too important” in Washington. And he has plenty of examples. I, for one, plan to be lining up at the bookstore.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

If you ask me what Congress should do first, cut taxes or cut spending, I will say: cut taxes. Cut taxes, cut taxes, cut taxes! Slash, hack, burn.

Career politicians are almost never going to cut spending. But once in a while they can be pressured into cutting taxes . . . at least a little. Just a little bit.

Spending should be snipped too, but who will do it? President Bush says he trusts the people to spend their own money more than he trusts the politicians. But even so, he’s been either unwilling or unable to submit a budget which actually cuts spending.

Instead his budget boosts spending by 4 percent, more than the rate of inflation. And already, congressional wheeling and dealing has bumped up the baseline to almost 5 percent. Soon it will be 6 percent or 7 percent.

The so-called surplus is just too tempting for the career politicians to keep their hands off. Return the extra tax money to the taxpayers? Oh my! That would be irresponsible. Not when there’s all this pork to peddle.

My complaint is bipartisan. The Republicans are as profligate with their own favored programs and pork as are the Democrats. How can you stand up to the kid with his hand in the cookie jar when your own hand is in the same darn cookie jar? So it’s just one big non-stop Demopublican spend-fest over there in the capital.

And guess who pays the bill, my fellow Americans? Yeah, that’s right. You and me.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

It makes you wonder: Don’t the politicians want California to recover from its energy crisis? A few years ago, California legislators took power grids away from power companies, told them to buy power in an uncontrolled wholesale market, and slapped controls on the prices they could charge consumers. The result: rolling blackouts.

Want to create a shortage? Just cap the price of a commodity below what it would have been on an open market. Demand will jump, supply will slump, profits will disappear, production will decline, and everybody will be unhappy. Markets give people what they need only when markets are free to operate. Okay, so the problems in California have confirmed Economics 101 yet again. So what’s the solution? Impose even more price controls!

Federal regulators are ordering new price caps on California electricity, to take effect whenever the supply falls below seven percent. In other words, when the supply gets very low, we’re gonna make sure we have rolling blackouts. Huh? Sad to say, career politicians and their friends in the bureaucracy often don’t even try to solve problems. They’re afraid to say, “Hey, prices are going to go up. That’s what happens when supply falls and demand increases. You’ll need to let those prices rise if you want to see new production, larger supply, and lower prices over the long run.”

But instead of showing leadership, our leaders would rather blame the power companies and promise the people cheap electricity. At least, whenever the lights are on.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

One man’s pork is another man’s juicy steak. Anyway, it’s all part of the political process.

Pork, steak, corned beef hash whatever you want to call it, it’s inevitable. So inevitable that reporter David Baumann, in a recent issue of National Journal, tells us that “if members didn’t push for projects in their own districts, one could seriously question whether they were doing their jobs.”

According to Baumann, district-specific federal spending seems more reasonable up close than it does from a distance. Close up, it looks more like nutritious steak than fatty and wasteful pork.

Consider Congressman John Myers, who for many years was not persuaded of the merits of a $182 million “railroad relocation project” in Lafayette, Indiana even though the railroad was blocking traffic. But in 1981, because of re-districting, Myers suddenly found himself representing Lafayette. And guess what? Using federal tax dollars to move the railroad suddenly made more sense. Well, it was blocking traffic, after all.

But is pork-barreling just inevitable? Well, maybe if you’re a career politician more worried about getting ahead than doing the right thing.

But not every congressman is an opportunistic careerist. During his brief tenure in the Congress, South Carolina’s Mark Sanford, who limited his congressional stay to three terms, was criticized for supporting spending cuts that affected his own district. He tells the story in his book, The Trust Committed to Me. Was Sanford “failing to do his job”? Or was he doing the right thing instead of the easy thing?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

I love sports statistics, don’t you? I love to hear about batting averages and home runs, how many touchdowns, etc.

But some of the stats are not so groovy. I’m thinking of numbers reported by the National Taxpayers Union.

According to a recent NTU study by Paul Gessing, when you tally up all the taxpayer-subsidized funding of stadium construction over the last decade, the taxpayer strikes out to the tune of $7.5 billion. That’s not an inspiring statistic.

And it’s not as if teams are struggling. Between 1990 and 2000, the average Major League Baseball player’s salary jumped 243 percent. The average National Football League player’s salary increased 143 percent. Meanwhile, taxpayers often have to shell out hundreds of millions of dollars for just one stadium in a big city.

Of course, what owners pay the players is their business. And of course, these tax dollars are our business. Something’s not quite kosher here. Don’t we already pay for tickets to get into the game? And if we watch our sports on television, don’t we already have to put up with the commercials that pay for the airtime?

It seems to me that if team owners want our support, they should ask us to give that support voluntarily, not demand that Uncle Sam extract it from our paychecks. As Gessing points out, the latter doesn’t seem quite sporting.

In recent years governments have made a small start getting the poorest of us off welfare. Now maybe it’s time to end welfare for the wealthiest.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Monday, May 7, 2001

If the career politicians were going to stop term limits anywhere, they were going to stop them in Florida. The “Eight is Enough” term limit initiative passed with 77 percent of the vote.

But that wasn’t good enough for the politicians, who spent years suing the voters to stop term limits. Finally the Florida Supreme Court said no, the voters knew what they were doing; the term limits stand.

But no career politician worth his salt is going to let the voters enjoy their democratic victory unmolested, right? So now the Florida careerists not only want to extend their potential stay in office from 8 years to 12: they also want to increase the length of each individual term.

Under a proposed ballot measure, House terms would be 4 years instead of 2; Senate terms would be 6 years instead of 4. Senate Majority Leader Tom Rossin, the measure’s sponsor, says that, quote, “one reason the Senate is more [deliberative] than the House is that we have 4 years instead of 2. You’re not looking over your shoulder saying, ‘Am I going to get in trouble?'”

Uh, excuse me? Get in trouble with whom the voters? The logical conclusion of this sort of reasoning is that the politicians should just serve for life, and never have to concern themselves with those pesky voters at all.

Max Linn, president of Florida Citizens for Term Limits, has the best response to this kind of malarkey. He says: “Eight is enough and borders on too much.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

I’m against poisoning innocent little girls. How about you? Oh, you’re against it too? Hey, great! But George Bush is all in favor, at least if you believe the propaganda recently being lobbed against his Administration.

One ad funded by an opposing political party that shall remain nameless features a cute little girl with a cup of water in her hand. She looks into the camera and asks, “May I please have some more arsenic in my water, Mommy?”

Charming, isn’t it? Apparently Democrats think Clinton was happily poisoning children for most of his Administration, because this all has to do with a last-minute rule imposed by Bill Clinton. The rule required that the water supply have no more than 10 parts per billion of arsenic, instead of no more than 50 parts per billion.

The Bush administration has set the costly new rule aside. Therefore, he is out to poison little girls.

But toxicologists will tell you, the dose makes the poison, otherwise we’d all be dropping like flies already. There have always been natural traces of all kinds of “poisons” in the environment and in our bodies. And there is just no scientific evidence that 50 parts per billion of arsenic poses a health risk.

Even if politicians disagree over the science, is it fair to imply that Mr. Bush is eager to poison little girls? Well, no . . . but this is the kind of demagoguery career politicians of every party practice when they’re desperate to hold onto power. Honest public policy starts with honest debate.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Forget about the rolling blackouts in California. Forget about our shaky relations with China, the federal debt, that F your kid just got on his math test or your trouble paying the rent this month. Yeah, we’ve got a real crisis on our hands, folks. I know you will be as stunned as I was. If you have a heart problem, I urge you to change the station right now.

No, it’s not a giant asteroid hurtling toward the earth. It’s term limits hurtling toward career politicians in the state of Maine. “It has been a disaster, a total and complete disaster,” says a college professor in Maine who was quoted in the paper recently. And the career politicians are nodding their heads furiously. For example, Maine’s governor, Angus King, says that by the time he leaves office after reaching his own eight-year limit, he will have served with a number of different speakers of the House and presidents of the Senate.

In the olden days, of course, you could get acquainted with just one guy and be sure he would stick around forever. What a catastrophe having to meet and greet so many new faces. King also complains now, get this that under term limits new people are constantly coming into the legislature and some lawmakers are being forced to leave office even when they are willing to continue to serve!! Oh no! So term limits have actually limited terms?! What a disaster for the career politicians. Somebody call an ambulance.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.