Categories
term limits

Unexpected Analogy

Senator Arlen Specter has been around a long time. When he changed his party affiliation from Republican to Democrat last week, he referenced his early public service on the Warren Commission. Mobbed by enthusiasts, he said, “I don’t think Lee Harvey Oswald had this big a crowd trailing him.”

That wasn’t a parting shot — Specter aims to stay in office. He only switched after polls showed that challenger Pat Toomey — about whose candidacy I reported the week before — would best him in the Republican primary.

Yup. Arlen Specter wants to stay in office so badly that he’s willing to carry on even after he has been effectively repudiated by his party of over 40 years.

Most of the commentary has been about how small a tent the GOP has become. Most pundits say this is bad for Republicans.

I’m not so sure. If the Democrats fail to usher in Nirvana in the next two years — if things, say, get even worse — a narrowed oppositional GOP could turn the electoral climate around pretty fast.

What most interests me, now, is that Specter’s affiliation-change shows how difficult it is to change currents in government. The old guard can flip, stay in power, and the power brokers switch chairs from friend to foe and vice versa.

If senators served under term limits, this whole issue — and the problem it reveals — would not even come up.

With term limits, a metaphorical Jack Ruby isn’t even necessary.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall term limits

The Untold Story of the Oklahoma Three

Receiving an award is a lot nicer than ten years in prison.

As regular listeners know, Rick Carpenter, Susan Johnson, and I were indicted by Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson on trumped-up, politically-motivated charges stemming from a petition drive to cap state government spending.

For almost two years this indictment hung over our heads. In all that time, the AG never even completed our preliminary hearing. Finally, all charges were dropped.

That vindication came in January. The next month, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, I received the Charlton Heston “Courage Under Fire” Award. And just weeks ago, I was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Sam Adams Alliance for my Oklahoma fight as well as decades of work for term limits and citizen initiative rights.

The recognition is nice . . . for my whole family, who suffered alongside me these past two years. But let’s also remember my co-defendants, Rick and Susan.

At one point Edmondson offered Susan Johnson a deal. If she would only plead guilty — saving face for the Attorney General — she would be charged with a misdemeanor, and her record would quickly be expunged.

With her legal bills mounting and her business hammered by the prosecution, she didn’t blink. Instead, she told the AG: “No way.”

Her commitment to doing the right thing led to an important legal victory. She gets my Award for Quiet Courage.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies

Schumer Should Shut It

Government subsidies give government officials a license to order the recipients around:

  • Spend on this.
  • Merge with that.
  • Get rid of this CEO.

You take our money, you take our orders. Strings definitely attached.

But there are other kinds of bullying, often more subtle than formally enacted laws and regulations applied to otherwise independent firms.

Some government goons toss their weight around in the private sector entirely outside any legislative or regulatory process. How? By “conversing” with private firms about how they conduct business.

Recently we witnessed Senator Chuck Schumer chatting with Time Warner Cable about its test of broadband metering in Rochester, New York. The cable company’s notion was to price different levels of service. Customers using huge amounts of bandwidth were charged extra for that extra usage.

In normal markets, buyers constantly communicate happiness or unhappiness with what sellers are selling, both verbally and through buying patterns. No politician had to chat with Coca Cola to convince it to bring back “Coca Cola Classic.”

But politicians like scoring political points. And companies subject to such persuasive efforts know that more than persuasion is involved. There’s also the threat of force if the company doesn’t knuckle under to the politician. So Time Warner dropped its price-tier trial.

And we’re all just a little less free today than we were yesterday.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
too much government

The Black Liquor Tax Credit

Senator John Kerry is incensed. He used the word “cheat.”

Senator Jeff Bingham insists Congress was not trying to make a tax loophole.

The fracas is over a four-year-old tax credit given to companies that mix biofuels with diesel. Congress wanted to encourage “greener” burning.

Well, it seems that paper companies have been burning a bioproduct in their plants for years, something called “black liquor.” It doesn’t sound green, but it is made from wood product. In response to Congress’s program, paper companies have taken to mixing it with diesel to qualify for the tax credit.

It wasn’t what Congress intended. But Congressfolk should hardly be surprised. A law has to apply across the board. You can’t make a general rule and then say, “Uh, no: We meant it to apply only to those businesses over there, not these ones over here.”

The New York Times notes that the scandal surfacing, now, might prove especially inconvenient for Congress, as the public roils over business and banking bailouts.

The congressional brain trust meant to give incompetent bankers billions. They didn’t mean to give International Paper $71 million, or Verso Paper $29.7 million.

Despite this, Congress has to live up to its own words. Not its intentions. In this case, Congress wants to blame corporations, not themselves. We’ll see if the august body of social engineers can pull that trick off.

Obviously, like Kermit the Frog, Congress is finding that it’s not easy being green.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability government transparency

Transparently Faster

If a promise is important, clear, specific — and keeping it would be honorable — well then, it’s bad to break it.

Alas, political candidates make and break such promises all the time. They make the promises to get votes, then break them from political expediency.

Usually, politicians don’t admit this. Usually, if they note the lapse at all, they plead some fictitious but awesome and unexpected impediment.

So, for example, candidate Obama’s promise that final legislation going to the president’s desk would be accessible online in every detail for a full five days before he signed it — well, that quickly went by the wayside. So has the idea of tracking every particular of so-called “stimulus” spending. Technical difficulties, they say.

Who knew the web-savvy Obama campaign would have so much trouble with “the Internets thing” once they got into power?

For some reason, however, a private company — unburdened by the rush to sign us all into permanent debt bondage — is doing much better when it comes to reporting the runaway spending. The Washington Times tells us that a firm called Onvia is tracking federal expenditures “down to the local level . . . in real-time speed.” Onvia has free software that people can use to follow the dollars.

Sounds like time for a little outsourcing.

Oh, wait, I forgot. The Obama administration is opposed to outsourcing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

Are They Out of Session Yet?

While Americans readily share power with their representatives, those representatives tend to resent sharing power with the people who choose them.

Need proof? Take Colorado. Last year, legislators passed a statute to restrict the petition process that Governor Ritter had to veto. Then legislators offered up Referendum O, to make it tougher for citizens to place initiative amendments on the ballot. Voters defeated it.

Now, Colorado legislators — including legislative leaders of both parties — fast-track a new bill to again restrict the initiative process.

In Nevada, the federal courts struck down a requirement that initiative sponsors collect signatures in 13 of 17 counties. Legislators then came back with a new law to force initiative proponents to gather signatures in all 17. That too was struck down. But now legislators propose that petitions must be gathered in all 42 state legislative districts.

In Missouri, Rep. Mike Parson pushes a bill to restrict the petition process. Though Parson admitted in a public hearing that part of his bill is probably unconstitutional, that part remains.

I have an idea. Let’s require that legislators gather a few thousand signatures to gain their own spot on the ballot. And let’s mandate that any restrictions they place on citizens petitioning to put issues on the ballot must also apply to them.

Oh, we might also need to send some of these scheming legislators packing at the next election.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
insider corruption too much government

Politicians Are Poor Sports

Several years ago, Washington, D.C., “won” a Major League Baseball franchise, the Nationals. City politicians, though constantly complaining about a lack of money even for essential programs,  miraculously came up with over $600 million to build a brand new stadium to lure the team.

Now that the team is playing in its new taxpayer-subsidized stadium, the battle over funding is over. But the war over tickets for the mayor and city council members to sit in a luxury skybox and watch the games escalates.

You see, the Nationals have given a luxury skybox to the mayor and another one to the city council. (Just as an aside, doesn’t this deal strike you as sort of like a bribe? It does me.) Anyway, it seems that the Nationals front office sent the tickets for both skyboxes to Mayor Adrian Fenty. And Fenty managed to forward tickets on to only those council members with whom he isn’t feuding. The other council members were left out, causing some hard feelings.

The very same thing happened last year, too.

There always seem to be problems when the bad guys split up the loot.

Well, one council member, Kwame Brown, offers a very simple solution: Sell both the skyboxes to the highest bidder and use the proceeds to help cover budget gaps.

Wow, a D.C. politician actually making sense. That’s a home run!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall too much government

No Exaggeration Necessary

Artful exaggeration is a part of good writing. Take this example from Yakima Valley Business Times editor Bruce Smith: “All of us who think we already pay too many taxes should bow west toward Mukilteo at least once a day.”

Smith did not figure he could set up a new religion. He was figuratively conveying the importance to the state of Washington of initiative activist Tim Eyman’s recent, successful measure requiring a two-thirds’ vote of the Legislature to hike taxes.

Smith also went on to talk about Tim Eyman’s newest proposal, which he is petitioning to place on the 2009 ballot. The measure is called I-1033, and officially dubbed the Lower Property Taxes Initiative. But Smith notes a feature of the proposal that stretches it, in a sense, beyond a mere property tax lowering device. “What I like most about the measure is that it reins in government growth,” writes Smith. “It limits the rate of government expansion to that of the overall economy.”

But here Smith doesn’t exaggerate at all. “Currently government grows at a level that is about 50 percent higher than that of the private sector,” he explains.

“[B]ureaucrats and the apologists have all sorts of excuses to rationalize why those levels of growth are necessary, but here’s the bottom line: Unless things change, government will become unsustainable.”

Exactly. No hyperbole.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
term limits too much government

Checking Specter

Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter is an important man. How do I know this?

A congressman told me.

While Specter is a Republican, his congressional booster happens to be a Democrat. Pennsylvania Congressman Robert Brady credits Specter with passage of Obama’s stimulus bill.

“[T]his bill would not have passed,” says Brady, “if not for Arlen Specter,” who was one of three Republican senators to break ranks for the presidents’ bailout extravaganza. In case you were wondering, Brady clarified his enthusiasm for the so-called “stimulus” package. “[E]very congressman is passing out checks, all over the country . . . because of a man named Arlen Specter.”

Clearly, Brady likes to pass out checks . . . as do most other congressmen.

But one former congressman doesn’t seem so fond of the program. Pat Toomey ran for Congress back in 1998 pledging to serve just three terms. He won, spent six years fighting wasteful, overbearing government, and then stepped down as promised.

Toomey, until very recently the president of the Club for Growth — a group dedicated to market growth, not growth of government — is likely to challenge Specter next year for his Senate seat.

The difference between Toomey and Specter? Toomey, being the challenger, may ask you to write a check to his campaign, while Specter, being the incumbent, will offer to give you a check . . . drawn on your account.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Washington to Regulate
Your Bake Sale

Informal production and distribution, from small farms and homes, were once not only common, but the backbone of everyday life.

Today, there’s a revival of much of this, as people begin to realize that corporate practices have increasingly relied upon putting additives in foods and plastics in other products.

I have sad news for locavores and other health food fans hoping to buck the trend of corporate practice: H.R. 875, the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009. This new bill, now worming its way through the corridors of Capitol Hill, would require anyone who stores or sells any food products to any third party to register with the federal government and keep extensive records about every product bought, produced, modified, or sold.

How far will the law reach? I suspect it will have no limit, which one section clarifies: “In any action to enforce the requirements of the food safety law, the connection with interstate commerce required for jurisdiction shall be presumed to exist.”

In other words, the federal government will, if this bill is passed and “successfully” administered, regulate everything, including (and down to) your local organic truck farm, festival, or bake sale.

This bit of food totalitarianism thus takes its place in a long line of federal government regulations that, in the name of safety, regulates small operations out of existence.

It makes no sense.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.