“The enemy is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on.”
Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961).
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Joseph Heller
On May 13, 1888, the Empire of Brazil abolished slavery with the passage of the Lei Áurea (“Golden Law”).
It’s unclear “what problem Amtrak privatization proposals are intended to solve,” an Amtrak white paper argues.
The authors assert that “giving the United States the passenger rail system it needs will require substantial, assured, multi-year federal funding. . . .”
That flies in the face of experience. But if you are looking for a problem to solve, consider the biggest current story about Amtrak, its thieving employees.
Buckle up, for the rail gets bumpy: Sixty-one of 119 Amtrak employees exposed in 2022 for perpetrating a healthcare scam were kept on the job until a recent internal investigation.
For several years, these employees had collected kickbacks from doctors willing to file fake medical claims.
Amtrak now promises that it is (finally) cleaning house.
The organization’s inspector general says that the large number of employees “who cavalierly participated in this scheme to steal Amtrak’s funds suggests not only a serious lapse in basic ethics, but a troubling workforce culture . . . in which blatant criminal behavior was somehow normalized.”
A culture that DOGE has been finding in many governmental endeavors.
What governments lack are decent feedback mechanisms that real markets provide. Amtrak operates in a fake reality of “needs” — those infinite “needs” mentioned in the white paper against privatization.
Businesses succeed; businesses fail — and if the latter, they move aside to let others try to do better. But the white paper treats business failure as proof that government funding is mandatory.
For taxpayers, always on the hook for Amtrak failures, privatization is a solution.
Privatization would also mean less tolerance for keeping thieves on payrolls.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The wisest of all, in my opinion, is he who can, if only once a month, call himself a fool — a faculty unheard of nowadays.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “Bobok : From Somebody’s Diary,” as translated by Constance Garnett in Short Stories (1900).
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Axis in Africa
On May 12, 1943, Axis forces in North Africa surrendered.
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A New Deadline
“The Treasury Department said Friday it would likely run out of cash to pay the nation’s bills by August,” Politico tells us, “setting a new, firmer deadline for Congress to act to avoid a catastrophic default on the United States’ more-than $36 trillion debt.”
“Because there is significant uncertainty in projecting cash flows months into the future,” Secretary of Treasury Scott K.H. Bessent wrote Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, on Friday, “it is impossible to identify precisely how long cash and extraordinary measures will last.” Bessent went on to surmise that funds “will be exhausted in August while Congress is scheuled to be in recess.”
The Secretary urged “Congress to increase or suspend the debt limit by mid-July,” to prevent another scurrying chaos about government operations, like we’re used to, and “to protect the full faith and credit of the United States.”
Not doing so, the Secretary informed the Speaker, “would wreak havoc on our financial system and diminish America’s security and global leadership position.”
Michael Stratford and Jennifer Scholtes at Politico draw the obvious extrapolation: “If congressional Republicans don’t get their party-line bill to President Donald Trump’s desk before Treasury exhausts its borrowing power, GOP leaders will likely be forced to seek votes from Democrats to head off the fiscal cliff — an exercise that would likely require making major policy concessions to the minority party and risk alienating fiscal hawks.”
“GOP Lawmakers are hashing out the details of what will be in the sweeping package,” explains USA Today, “which is expected to boost funding for border security and defense while cutting taxes and possibly cutting social programs such as Medicaid.”
What are the odds that Republicans will work together to reduce government in their promised megabill before this new “deadline”?
Odds are that they will only increase spending. No?
Paul Jacob writes about the budgeting process, debt crises, and allied subjects with some regularity. “The Continuing Crisis,” from March, gives a good idea of his general tenor.
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John Wilkes
When told by a constituent that he would rather vote for the devil, Wilkes responded: “Naturally.” He then added: “And if your friend decides against standing, can I count on your vote?”
Arthur H. Cash, John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty (2006).
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Union, disunion
On May 11, 1858, Minnesota was admitted as the 32nd U.S. State.
Nine years later, to the day, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg’s independence and neutrality were affirmed in the Second Treaty of London.
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“So Successful”
In case there was any mystery left to the Democrats’ relay race to losing the 2024 presidential election, Joe Biden has explained it all.
Did he, asked the BBC’s Nick Robinson, just perhaps . . . drop out too late?
“What happened was,” replied the old pol, “what we had set out to do, no one thought we could do, and [had] become so successful in our agenda that [it] was hard to say ‘now I’m gonna stop now.’”
Well, he said something like that. If you want to talk about hard-to-do things, try transcribing 2025-year Biden.
“I meant what I said when I started,” Biden goes on, and after a word-stumble salad, goes on further, “‘I’m preparing to hand this to the next generation.’ The transition government. But . . . it . . . moved so quickly that it made it difficult to walk away.
“It was a hard decision.”
Regrets then?
“No, I think it was the right decision.”
Well, that clears it all up.
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Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Money is coined liberty, and so it is ten times dearer to the man who is deprived of freedom. If money is jingling in his pocket, he is half consoled, even though he cannot spend it.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead (1915), as translated by Constance Garnett, p. 16.