Common Sense with Paul Jacob

It was President Harry Truman — a supporter of term limits — who said that if you want a friend in Washington, buy yourself a dog. I decided to take Truman’s advice and got one.

Actually, it was my 9-year old who snookered the dog out of my wife in exchange for a consistently clean room. We didn’t really get the consistently clean room but we did get the dog: Bugsy, a golden retriever.

He was our very first dog. Bugsy made our crazy, hectic household even more crazy and hectic. He was a real burden. We couldn’t seem to make him behave and there were various carpet-related mishaps, chewed furniture, etc. Maybe the idea of a dog on top of our busy lives was just too much. My wife and I were afraid we might have to find another family for Bugsy. It began to really look dark for the mutt when he devoured some paper of mine that seemed really important at the time. Great, my dog ate it!

But the next morning I climbed on the scale and noticed I’d lost 10 pounds. Hmmm. Maybe those walks with Bugsy were making a difference.

Then, at breakfast, my 9-year-old let slip as to how she knew we would always love her no matter what if we could still love Bugsy after all the things he had destroyed.

Well, to make a long story short, we kept the dang critter. And we love him very much. The moral of the story is this: Sometimes in life when you take on burdens, they don’t weigh you down . . . they lift you up.

This is Common Sense . I’m Paul Jacob.

We keep hearing that letting you manage your Social Security account yourself would be a “risky scheme.” Markets fluctuate. The value of a stock or bond can go down as well as up. Risky. But the key here is what happens in the long run. And the fact is, in any twenty-year period, real return in the stock market averages more than 10 percent.

You don’t have to be an expert investor, either, because as manager of your own funds you can pick relatively conservative investment plans. And there is every reason to believe that an average investor can acquit himself quite nicely over the 45 years or so of a typical career, and earn a lot more than he’s now being promised under Social Security. Find out for yourself by visiting the socialsecurity.org web site. The site has a calculator that lets you compare your promised Social Security benefits with what you could have earned, if only you’d been allowed to invest your social security taxes in the market instead of in politicians.

If you were born in 1948 and now earn $20,000 a year, you can expect to get $903 a month from Social Security. But if you had been investing the same funds in bonds earning 6 percent, you could expect $1,257 a month. And with stocks earning 10 percent, what your retirement income could have been shoots up to $5,930 a month. Or, to $8,895 a month if you’re now earning $30,000 a year. But don’t take my word for it. Go to the socialsecurity.org web site and plug in your own numbers. Find out what you’re missing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

A tax by any other name is just the same. The latest method is taxation by lawsuit, and the biggest victims have been the tobacco companies.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m no fan of death by slow poison. Nor am I a big fan of the way the tobacco executives have hedged and fudged and lied about the often destructive effects of their product. But nobody forces anybody to smoke a cigarette. I hasten to add that I have nothing against smokers either. Some of my best friends and spouses are smokers. I just don’t think we should be heaping huge and devious punishment on the tobacco companies for supplying their customers with a perfectly legal product that the customers consume of their own free will. This kind of multi-billion dollar taxation-by-litigation is not only arbitrary and punitive, it’s hypocritical, too.

Remember the rationale the various state governments gave for going after big tobacco? It was to pay for disease prevention, medical costs for smokers, anti-tobacco propaganda, and so on. But, now it turns out that most of the $246 billion payoff is being spent on other “priorities.”

According to the General Accounting Office, the states are spending only about 41 percent of their share of the settlement on health-related stuff. Most of the dough is being spent willy-nilly by the politicians on all manner of new programs. The usual. I’d like to think this is the last bit of hypocritical taxation-by-litigation that we’ll see. But I doubt it. When governments find a neat new way to take our money, they tend to get addicted to it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

What a relief. By the skin of their teeth, Tennessee taxpayers have escaped a state income tax for yet another year. But you know the old saying: It ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings, or until the heat death of the universe, whichever comes last. Career politicians are nothing if not persistent.

In Tennessee, they have what they call budget problems. The career politicians want to run almost every aspect of your life, but running every aspect of your life costs money. Lots. As one state senator says, “Once people understand the implications of having an unhealthy state government fewer people with diplomas, with health care I think things will change when [the income tax] comes up again.”

I’m optimistic that Tennessee citizens can avoid being saddled with a state income tax so long as they remain vigilant. But in that case, how could the career politicians get the necessary funding to run every aspect of their lives? It’s quite a dilemma. Maybe we could do something like this: Every time a Tennessee taxpayer earns a paycheck, he could immediately sign it over to the state government. Then the state could buy everybody’s food, pay everybody’s rent and mortgages and medical care and schooling and so forth.

Because this kind of system makes the community come together, let’s call it communism. It would be inefficient and wasteful, and nobody would have “no freedom no more.” But, at least there would not be any more battles over personal income tax. And, if it goes okay in Tennessee, they could try it elsewhere.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

It’s the Pop-Tarts. They could be dangerous. And your toaster, too. What I have to tell you is a shocking tale of innocent trust, of leaving Pop-Tarts in a toaster to drive the kids to school, and of Pop-Tarts getting stuck in the unattended toaster and causing a fire while the person who put the Pop-Tarts in the toaster was taking the kids to school.

This is what happened to the Hurff family. And Brenda Hurff is suing The Kellogg Company, which makes Pop-Tarts. She is also suing Black and Decker, which makes the toaster. No word yet on whether she is suing herself for leaving the toaster unattended. Over the past ten years, the U.S. government has received 17 reports of fires involving toaster pastries. That’s an incredible 1.7 toaster-pastry-related fires per year. Apparently the jam in Pop-Tarts is a little more flammable then the bread in bread. Let’s calculate the risk here.

This year the Pop-Tart people reported $500 million in U.S. sales. It costs about $2 per box of Pop-Tarts. If there are six pastries to a box, 15 billion Pop-Tarts were sold this year. With tarts toasted two at a time, there were 7.5 billion opportunities this year to lose your home to Pop-Tarts. An average 1.7 reported incidents per year means that your chances of being burned by Pop-Tarts during any given toasting are about 1 in 4 billion. Yet, Pop-Tarts continue to be inserted into toasters. And people also keep putting food in frying pans on stoves hamburgers, scrambled eggs, you name it. People, listen to me: Don’t play with fire. Just buy cereal. Cold cereal. It’s safer.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Are you online? In the U.S., it’s getting easier all the time to ring up the Internet. Computers get cheaper and cheaper every year, more and more accessible. Never mind all the political chatter of a “digital divide” that you supposedly need politicians and bureaucrats to bridge for you.

The fact is, by the fall of 2000, some 51 percent of all U.S. homes had a computer, and about 41 percent had access to the Internet. Chances are, if you’re not online already, getting there just isn’t very high on your “to do” list.

But suppose you do want to log onto the Internet but have to watch your pennies? Well, the people who brought you the information revolution are eager to help. One thing they’ve done is set up an organization called ConnectNet ( Conectado in Spanish), which directs callers to local libraries and other organizations that provide Internet access. ConnectNet is funded by AOL Time/Warner. They have a toll-free hotline, 1-866-583-1234.

If there’s a true digital divide to worry about, it’s to be found elsewhere on this globe. Depending on which country you live in, you might not even have a telephone, let alone a PC and a modem. But that problem is being tackled, too, as engineers and researchers develop scaled-down and more affordable versions of the PC that can at least hook folks up to the web.

A lot more political freedom in some of these countries couldn’t hurt either. If only we could solve the “Liberty Divide,” any so-called Digital Divide would be gone in no time.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

The fellows who brought us this grand experiment in self-government we know as America were big, I mean really BIG, on a free press. Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.”

Today most of us get our news from TV; we listen to radio in our cars; fewer and fewer read the paper. There is no problem with that, per se, just that TV and radio are not as free under the First Amendment as newspapers are because the government, through the FCC, regulates TV and radio.

I bring this up because such trivial matters make a difference in the real world. A TV station in Bismarck, North Dakota has pulled a spot by the American Conservative Union critical of Senator Kent Conrad’s stance on Social Security. This was done at the fervent urging of, you guessed it, Senator Kent Conrad. Before talking to the senator, the TV station deemed the ad fit for broadcast, but afterwards, no.

Often there’s a controversy over ads portraying an officeholder’s position. But the public isn’t stupid. We can sort out bogus arguments from the truth provided all sides are free to speak. But today, powerful incumbents throw their weight around with broadcasters whom they ultimately regulate and effectively silence speech. Today, Senator Conrad’s ad is running countering the ACU ad he had removed from your TV set.

Kerri Houston of ACU says, “The senator seems to think that the First Amendment only applies to him.” The scariest thing is how right he is.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Every 10 years we take a census so that new political lines can be drawn for Congress and the state legislatures. It’s the state legislatures that draw the lines, which are then ratified like any other piece of legislation.

These lines really matter. As the Center for Voting and Democracy tells us, “With increasingly sophisticated computer software, polling results and demographic data, incumbent legislators quite literally choose the voters before the voters have a chance to choose them.” The Center notes that as a result of redistricting, “most voters are locked into one-party districts where their only real choice at election time is to ratify the incumbent or heir apparent.”

I’m not shocked that state legislators tend to reward themselves, at least those in the majority, with seats that are designed to elect . . . well, them. But how do congressmen get such nice treatment? After all, the congressmen don’t draw the district lines, not directly.

Good connections help. So does a little bribery. Take California, where Michael Berman, brother of Congressman Howard Berman, is the legislature’s appointed line-drawing guru. U.S. Representative Loretta Sanchez publicly admits that she and 30 of the 32 Democratic congressional incumbents have already paid Berman $20,000 each for what she calls an “incumbent-protection plan.”

“Twenty thousand is nothing to keep your seat,” says Sanchez. “I spend $2 million every election. If my colleagues are smart, they’ll pay their $20,000, and Michael will draw the district they can win in.” She adds, “Those who have refused to pay? God help them.”

God help them? God help us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

A frozen food caucus? A frozen food caucus? Oh come on. Really?

Well, apparently, yes, there is indeed a frozen food caucus now in the Congress. It’s brand-new. Representatives Cal Dooley and Butch Otter are the co-chairs. The American Frozen Food Institute is the driving force behind the caucus, and it notes that co-chairs Dooley and Otter have a “vested interest” in frozen food. You see, each congressman has a couple of frozen food processing facilities in his district. So you just know this is a burning issue for them.

Anyway, why not? For good or for ill, Congress gets involved in virtually every aspect of our lives these days. Few congressmen any longer judge legislation according to wide political principles that can be applied to, say, the food industry as a whole rather than just the frozen food industry. Or industry as a whole rather than just the food industry. Or economic life as a whole rather than just this industry or that industry.

It’s a chilling thought. Public policy these days is all about special rules and special regulations and special tax breaks and special subsidies, unique to you and your industry or sub-sector of the industry. It’s all about who you know and what you can give them in return for what they give you. You couldn’t have a Life-Liberty-and-the-Pursuit-of-Happiness Caucus. There aren’t any bills pending about that.

The Frozen Food Institute has lobbied Congress on everything from trade barriers to frozen onion standards. For them, a frozen food caucus makes sense. I just hope frozen corn and frozen Salisbury steak will be treated fairly.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

This is war. And on our shores. Thousands of American citizens murdered in cold blood. But despite our pain and suffering as a people, we are still strong. Not only militarily, but also in our love of freedom and our commitment to defend it come what may.

Some have argued that America will never be the same. In a sense that’s true: we’ll certainly never forget this savage and senseless attack. And we have much work to do to make certain it doesn’t happen again. But it’s important to be careful how we go about it.

In the wake of this unprecedented brutality, two out of three Americans say they would be willing to trade some civil liberties to get more security. But this is isn’t our real choice. Nothing about increasing our security requires abridging our civil rights. We don’t have to let the terrorists win, not in any respect. For these terrorists would like nothing better than to knock America off our foundation, our principles, the things that make us truly the greatest country the world has ever known. They hate our freedom. Let’s sustain that freedom. Let’s show the whole world: we are the same America.

The same America whose rifle shot for freedom was heard ’round the world in 1776, and is still being heard today. The same America that freed Europe from the Nazis and Asia from imperial Japan. Let it be known in the face of this terror today that we are indeed the same America the land of the free and the home of the brave.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.