Common Sense with Paul Jacob

Millionaire entrepreneur Norman Braman, an auto dealer, may not be going as far as I’d like in his campaign against a proposed Miami baseball stadium. But so far as he goes, I’m with him all the way.

My question is — Why should any government entity ever be spending taxpayer money on stadiums? There are tickets and promotions and things that raise mucho dinero for franchises. Top players scoop up millions in salary. If big-time sports are not financially viable operations, what could be? And if sometimes owners lack as much money as they might like to spend on a stadium, why should a taxpayer who never watches a game have to pay for it?

Miami-Dade intends to fork over $347 million of taxpayer money plus a $35 million loan. All with no public hearings, no open discussion. No public vote on whether taxpayer money should be splurged on this. Zero due diligence.

So Mr. Braman is suing to expose the shabby politics surrounding the project.

Braman hopes to compel the city to function more responsibly. The evidence so far shows officials have been lazy at best. In one deposition, Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Alvarez admitted that he had never even seen a financial statement of the Florida Marlins. He never even requested a financial statement.

That’s strike number one. Let’s hope Braman pitches a perfect game.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

We could use a few million-dollar ideas to help fight juvenile crime.

How about a half-million-dollar idea?

The Justice Department gave $500,000 to the World Golf Foundation. The foundation’s beneficiary program is called  “First Tee.” It’s designed to get youngsters interested in that most civilized of sporting passions, golf.

Employees in the Justice Department had rated the program way down on their list. But the administrator of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, J. Robert Flores, awarded the money anyway, ignoring programs that employees had ranked as much more effective.

“We need something really attractive to engage the gangs and the street kids, golf is the hook,” said the questionable administrator in question.

Yeah, right. Remember the midnight basketball leagues, supported as a brainy idea by Bill Clinton? Well, at least lots of inner city kids like basketball. Golf seems something of a stretch.

ABC News interviewed a former Justice Department employee for Nightline. Obviously disgruntled, the ex-employee called the program a  “waste.”

It turns out that President Bush is the honorary chairman of First Tee. The clear implication? That’s why this golf gig got money while many obviously more practical programs were left unfunded.

Chalk it up to pork envy. Congress can’t have all the insider payola for itself.

Did somebody just yell  “Fore!”? Well, it’s not  “for(e) the children.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

It takes a network of restaurants to feed the Senate, badly.

In 44 years, the dining hall and mini-chain of cafeterias and coffee shops have been profitable only seven. This year the operation will run in the red to the tune of $2 million.

And come lunchtime, folks working in the Senate regularly run over to the House to eat. One critic says Senate victuals are “so bad that the . . . House ‘Taco Salad Wednesday’ trumps any type of entree they have to offer.”

In the House, though, the cafeterias have been privately run for decades. House staffers never flee to the Senate at lunchtime.

Solution? Privatize the Senate restaurants as well. Senator Dianne Feinstein just pushed through legislation to do that. She doesn’t think “taxpayers should be subsidizing something that doesn’t need to be.” She notes that current restaurant management never even bothers trying to break even, knowing their deficits will be covered.

Feinstein has opponents. Another Democrat, Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, says it’s hypocritical for his colleagues to condemn privatization of workers generally, but then “privatize the workers here in the Senate and leave them out on their own.”

So, what should we do, Senator? Communize the whole economy so no responsible adult is ever “out on his own”?

Menendez is right about the contradiction, but not about how to resolve it. Amtrak? The post office? Both should be out on their own. Along with Senate food service.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Unemployment went up in May. Why?

Well, note the two sectors where unemployment went up the most: teens and African-Americans.

Teenagers, as schools let out for summer, tend to change jobs and seek new ones, en masse. But that’s seasonal, and the figures for unemployment rates already adjust for that.

So why did teen unemployment increase by 3.3 percent, and for blacks unemployment go up 1.1 percent?

Steve Horwitz, a St Lawrence University economist, points out that last summer politicians in Washington pounded their chests about how good they were and raised the national minimum wage. Trouble is, minimum wage laws don’t increase skills. Or productivity. All they do is prohibit employers from paying below a certain rate, currently $5.85 an hour. In late July that shoots higher.

So employers become pickier. Increase the amount they must pay and they will naturally try to find every way they can to increase the productivity of those employees affected by the new minimum.

They tend to fire (or not hire) inexperienced workers, like teenagers, and those who have invested the least in their own skillset — historically, in America, that amounts to a statistically large percentage of African Americans.

“With a sluggish economy,” Horwitz writes, “it certainly seems possible that the higher minimum wage is discouraging employers from hiring lower-skill workers . . .”

Which suggests our politicians are also, if not low-skilled, low-wisdomed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Democrats thump their chests. Congress just passed a budget . . . in an election year. For the previous four election cycles, that hasn’t happened.

But, since the budget crossed the $3 trillion mark for the first time ever, let’s choke our huzzahs. The federal government is spending us — and especially our children — into ruin.

The Iraq War is incredibly expensive, but spending for other items has shot up, too. Senator Obama says he’ll withdraw our troops, but doesn’t say he’ll do it in his first term. Budget-wise that doesn’t even matter. Obama has already said he’ll simply spend the money now spent on the war on other federal programs.

It gets worse. Sheila Weinberg, head of the Institute for Truth in Accounting, tells USA Today that “We’re running deficits in the trillions of dollars, not the hundreds of billions we’re being told.”

The official deficit last year was $162 billion. But government accounting is, well, crooked. It ignores huge liabilities like Social Security, Medicare, pensions for government workers, VA benefits. Use proper accounting standards and the deficit comes to a whopping $2.5 trillion.

Our national debt is already $57.3 trillion, when federal entitlements are factored in. With local and state government liabilities, the total is nearly $62 trillion, more than half a million per household.

Still, the Democrats running Congress say they’ll have a budget surplus by 2012. How? Well, through massive tax increases . . . which, speaking to other crowds, they promise won’t happen.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

I received an announcement from Governor Sanford of South Carolina. The odd thing is that I could read the whole document verbatim and you couldn’t tell the governor’s thoughts from mine. I’m in complete agreement.

With what?

Well, the new bill he signed, H.3803. It removes the legal requirement for shampooers to receive the same state-mandated 1,500 hours of training that cosmetologists receive.

Unfortunately, the bill does nothing to address the fact that state law requires 1,500 hours of training to be a cosmetologist — almost four times the amount of state-required training to become a police officer — and just one of a number of examples of overregulation by state government that Governor Sanford highlighted during the news conference.

There. I’ve just cribbed more than a paragraph from Governor Sanford.

And no, governor, your check is not in the mail.

The truth about South Carolina is that it is an amazingly over-regulated state. It makes no sense to demand cosmetologists be more schooled in their art than police. The worst that could happen from a bad cosmetologist? A bad hair-do. Lice. The worst from a police officer? You could be shot in the head.

Sanford said such regulation “is more about protecting the profits of people in a particular industry rather than protecting the consumer.”

In most cases, he said. The other cases?

Those regulations are “Just plain silly.”

Bingo.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.