Categories
too much government

Paying the Right Wage

Local government is hard. In rural areas, it can be like organizing an ongoing bake-sale. In metropolitan areas, it’s more like running a small country.

Today’s big metropolitan governments tend to be run by un-term-limited oligarchs, so of course corruption is endemic. When there’s little competition for power and scant oversight, then the “above-board deals” become, de facto, insider deals.

And we wind up paying more in salaries and benefits for government workers than anything else. Recently, George Will off-handedly noted that in California “80 cents of every government dollar goes for government employees’ pay and benefits.”

Is that “too much”? Had we limited government, we would still expect salaries to make up a huge chunk of government. But since transfer payments are part and parcel of so much of modern governance, the fact that employee compensation packages are actually crowding out other line items should give us more than pause.

Truth is, though, it needn’t be hard to tell who is over- or under-paid, according to economist Arnold Kling:

If you do not have enough sanitation workers because you cannot fill job openings at the current level of pay, then those government workers are underpaid.

On the other hand, if you do not have enough sanitation workers because your budget is busted by the ones you have, then those government workers are overpaid.

Take that notion to your next local government board meeting. Big or small.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
tax policy

A Chill Hits Illinois

That big bump in the night? It was the sound of a massive new tax increase dropping on the backs of Illinois citizens and businesses.

Not long after midnight, Wednesday morning, mere hours before the newly elected legislature was to be sworn into office, the state’s lame-duck legislature voted to increase the personal income tax by a whopping 67 percent and the business income tax by nearly 50 percent.

That’s lame, all right.

Governor Pat Quinn, who had campaigned in favor of a smaller increase, will sign the bigger tax hike. “Our fiscal house was burning,” he said in its defense.

Is the fire now out?

Well, there sure is a lot of smoke, and where there’s smoke, there’s . . . a lot of people making a quick exit.

Remember, people can vote with their feet. “Leaving Illinois,” a study by the Illinois Policy Institute, points out that between 1991 and 2009 Illinois lost one resident every ten minutes.

That’s $16.9 billion in lost state and local tax revenue.

So Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was quick to offer a safer haven. “In these challenging economic times while Illinois is raising taxes, we are lowering them.”

As William Brodsky, chief executive of CBOE Holdings Inc, argues, “Merely throwing tax dollars at a broken system, without overhauling the expense side of the ledger, compounds the problem. . .” Bemoaning Illinois’ lost tax advantage in attracting business, Brodsky remarked, “They don’t come here for the weather.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

The Omaha Recall

A Wall Street Journal story on the campaign to recall the mayor of Omaha, Nebraska, quotes the head of the U.S. Conference of Mayors saying that recall petitions should be made more difficult because “the political climate is toxic.”

Toxic to whom, betrayed citizens or out-of-touch politicians?

You know whose side I’m on. I took three weeks off my regular duties to manage the recall’s petition drive.

Such efforts aren’t easy. We needed signatures equaling 35 percent of the vote for mayor. A group called “Omaha Forward” harassed our petitioners, regularly predicted our failure in the news media and hurled charges of fraud at us. When we turned in the necessary 37,000 signatures, certified by elections officials, the group filed a lawsuit to block the recall.

Just before Christmas, I traveled back to Omaha to testify at the trial over the petition. The mayor’s attorney called me “The Music Man,” an out-of-towner out to swindle good Nebraskans. But not one single signature verified by the county was invalidated. As the judge said in his decision, “Plaintiff introduced evidence to attack the credibility of certain circulators and a Paul Jacob, the coordinator for the paid circulators. . . . This Court found Paul Jacob credible and accepted his testimony as truthful.”

The recall of Omaha’s mayor is on the ballot, January 25. Whether he is removed from office or not, voters have demonstrated that they cannot be taken for granted. A lawful democratic process prevails.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment ideological culture

The Nihilist as the Vilest

Yesterday I surveyed the media landscape and found the weekend’s most obnoxious theme: That Jared Lee Loughner, the apprehended suspect killer in Saturday’s Tucson massacre, was somehow spurred to commit his gruesome shooting spree by the “inflamed rhetoric” of today’s protest politics. I titled my effort “Killer Apprehended, Vitriol’s to Blame.” Hans Bader had a better title for his Washington Examiner contribution: “Shootings obscure America’s generally bland and timid political culture.”

Yes, bland, he wrote.

“My French relatives regularly denounce their country’s leaders in far more heated and pungent terms than Americans like Sarah Palin do. Founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were attacked far more vitriolically in the media than recent presidents like Obama and Bush were. . . .” He notes that today’s left-leaners have become so timid as to become “stiflingly conformist.”

In Slate, Jack Shafer pointed out that “Any call to cool ‘inflammatory’ speech is a call to police all speech, and I can’t think of anybody in government, politics, business, or the press that I would trust with that power.” David Weigel, also in Slate, turned his gaze on a politician actually writing legislation to “shut down” uncool speech, noting that “[t]here’s no evidence — none — that violent pictures or words inspired the violence in Arizona.”

So, what motivated Loughner? A Mother Jones exclusive sketches the young man’s fixation on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and . . . meaning. But neither Loughner’s philosophical nihilism nor his will to annihilate fit well with any purely political narrative.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture media and media people

Killer Apprehended, Vitriol’s to Blame

On Saturday, a mentally unstable 22-year old man opened fire in a shopping center in Tucson, Arizona, seriously injuring a congresswoman, murdering six and wounding eleven more.

According to the New York Times, “Bloodshed Puts New Focus on Vitriol in Politics.” The Washington Post’s coverage could have run under the same headline: “The mass shooting Saturday morning that gravely wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and killed a federal judge raised serious concerns that the nation’s heated political discourse had taken a dangerous turn.”

No mention of the person who actually pulled the trigger. Instead, insinuations that those who have strongly expressed their political opinions are the real culprits.

“The rhetoric has devolved and descended past the ugly, and past the threatening, and past the fantastic, and into the imminently murderous,” argued MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. Olbermann’s guest, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, while admitting he didn’t know the shooter’s motivation, suggested the violence was the “inevitable” result of “violent political rhetoric” and “incitement.”

The Huffington Post trotted out Arizona Democratic Congressman Raul Grijalva to relay the day’s message against “vitriolic rhetoric” from “extreme elements of the Tea Party.” Grijalva attacked Sarah Palin, arguing, “if she wants to help the public discourse, the best thing she could do is to keep quiet.”

Let us mourn the deceased, support the injured, prosecute the guilty. Yes. But it is indecent to twist an act of violence into an excuse to smear opponents and silence robust political debate.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom too much government

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Bureaucracy

Ted Williams — not the late baseball great, but a formerly homeless, recovering drug and alcohol addict of the same name — received a second chance at life thanks to his announcer-quality voice.

A video displaying his talent — first posted at the Columbus Dispatch site — won him that chance. Soon he was headed to New York to appear on television and visit his mom, whom he had not seen in many years.

But, not so fast. Williams wasn’t allowed to fly.

The hold-up? Government control of airport security protocols.

You see, those who cannot “prove” their identity by displaying a government-issued ID are treated as terrorism suspects.

Sure, sure: It would’ve been easy to confirm that Williams lacked both the intention and the weapons to take over a plane. But that’s not the bureaucratic way.

Jim Harper, an expert on the burgeoning national surveillance state, pointed out on Cato@Liberty that one likely result of a national ID requirement will be to “exclude the indigent from rungs on the ladder [of advancement in life]. . . . A land of freedom doesn’t put paperwork requirements between a man on the rebound and a long-awaited reunion with his mother.”

Homeland Security’s obstreperousness resulted in what turned out to be a minor delay. Thanks to The Today Show and The Early Show, Williams was able to fly the next day.

Great for Williams. For others? Most rungs up from homelessness don’t garner major network support.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies U.S. Constitution

The Warfare Over General Welfare

Constitutionalists, flush with the attention being paid this very day in the House of Representatives to the land’s highest law, finally get to hold their conversations outside of seminars and institutes.

Some pundits argue that Tea Party folks will be surprised by how much power the Constitution gives the federal government. (Sure, I miss the Articles of Confederation.)

But however much power Madison & Co. bestowed upon the Feds, there is a limit. This comes as a shock to career politicians who envision government as all things to all people, from world cop to tooth fairy.

They like to point to the “general welfare clause,” which reads: “The Congress shall have the Power To . . . provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.” Could this mean Congress can do anything it wants, if designed to help people generally?

Yesterday, several Wall Street Journal readers cleared up any misunderstandings.

Michael Hanselman of Maryland cited Thomas Jefferson’s 1814 conviction that “Congress had not unlimited powers . . . to provide for the general welfare, but were restrained to those specifically enumerated.”

Arnold Nelson of Chicago quoted from Federalist 41, where James Madison, the Constitution’s chief architect, decried an expansive view of “general Welfare” as “a very fierce attack against the Constitution.” Mr. Nelson and Mr. Madison point to the 18 enumerated powers in Section 8, which are the only powers Congress has to affect the general welfare.

The intent? Clear. Today’s reality? Much different.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Second Amendment rights

Keep Firing

Now that the Supreme Court agrees that there’s a Second Amendment, the one about how the right to keep and bear arms shan’t be infringed, lower courts are feeling free to load this constitutional ammo as well.

Ohio’s Supreme Court just ruled 5-2 against Cleveland’s requirement for registering handguns and against a ban on assault weapons, upholding a state law banning onerous gun control.

The losing side argues that the Ohio law violates the home rule rights of municipalities. Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson says, “Our inability to enforce laws that are right for our city flies in the face of home rule and takes power away from the people at the local level.”

If some mugger with a gun is lurching at you in a dark alley, and you’ve got no gun — or if some armed lunatic is shooting into a crowd, and you’ve got no gun — you may wish you had one. And probably would not find consoling the thought, “Well, at least these local victim-disarmament laws are ‘right for the town.’”

The Ohio Supreme Court ruled that Ohio’s anti-victim-disarmament law “does not unconstitutionally infringe on municipal home rule authority.”

Yes. If constitutional protections of individual rights could be countermanded at will, not only the 2nd and 14th Amendments but also all other explicit and implicit constitutional protections of our rights would be dead letters whenever any burg says so.

But there can’t be a constitutional right to ignore constitutional rights.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets initiative, referendum, and recall too much government

Pay the Boatman

Attack the outsider — the first resort of the unarmed arguer.

My Townhall column praising Washington State anti-tax activist Tim Eyman raised the ire of Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat. He insinuates that it’s easy for me to like Eyman, for I never need to “catch the late boat after a Mariners game,” since I live in Virginia and Eyman’s initiatives affect the Evergreen State’s ferries.

Westneat complains that a voter-approved Eyman measure reducing car taxes took away the main source of subsidy (he doesn’t use that word) for Puget Sound’s ferry system. Turning common-sense responsibility on its head, he writes, “instead of levying a tax across a broad group (all car owners), as we did pre-Eyman to help pay for ferries, the costs now are increasingly heaped on a narrow group — the ferry riders themselves.”

Horrors! People paying for what they use!

Westneat seems to be into financial irresponsibility. “Yes, [the system] wastes money sometimes. What big organization doesn’t?” Nice dismissal of the incompetence and corruption in a state-run biz that cannot even account for its cash.

When the ferries were taken over from private business by the state, it was, he says, because of the previous owners’ “usurious 30-percent fare hikes.” Not mentioned? This followed the cessation of Seattle’s wartime shipworks, and a huge decrease in demand.

Some folks sure apply basic economic insights selectively. Dispersing costs, concentrating benefits? That they idolize. Economies of scale? Their arguments run aground.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies U.S. Constitution

Reading Comprehension

Never has the Constitution been read on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. And, boy, does our political situation show it.

When the 112th Congress convenes this week, the law of the land — the limited, enumerated powers granted to the federal government by “We the People” in this 223-year old document — will for the first time be spoken aloud for all honorables to hear. It’s a quick read, less than 5,000 words, and presumably cameras will be rolling, so we’ll know if any elected representative sticks finger into ear during the recitation.

A hat-tip to the Tea Party movement, this reading of the Constitution is a great way to remind our legislators that such a document actually exists.

Even better, a new rule will be proposed requiring every piece of legislation to have affixed a citation “where in the Constitution Congress is empowered to enact such legislation.”

Sure, Washington pundits have mocked this newborn constitutionalism, crying “gimmick!” One history professor called it “entirely cosmetic.” Tea Party activists are skeptical, too. As they should be.

Neither reading the Constitution nor declaring the constitutional authority for legislation amounts to magic. But, with a political process in which politicians rarely recognize any limits to their wizardry, a requirement that Congress specifically pay attention to whether its actions are permitted by the Constitution is, well, really good.

Will it lead to Congress actually abiding by the limits of our Constitution? It certainly couldn’t hurt.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.