Common Sense with Paul Jacob

If you ask me what Congress should do first, cut taxes or cut spending, I will say: cut taxes. Cut taxes, cut taxes, cut taxes! Slash, hack, burn.

Career politicians are almost never going to cut spending. But once in a while they can be pressured into cutting taxes . . . at least a little. Just a little bit.

Spending should be snipped too, but who will do it? President Bush says he trusts the people to spend their own money more than he trusts the politicians. But even so, he’s been either unwilling or unable to submit a budget which actually cuts spending.

Instead his budget boosts spending by 4 percent, more than the rate of inflation. And already, congressional wheeling and dealing has bumped up the baseline to almost 5 percent. Soon it will be 6 percent or 7 percent.

The so-called surplus is just too tempting for the career politicians to keep their hands off. Return the extra tax money to the taxpayers? Oh my! That would be irresponsible. Not when there’s all this pork to peddle.

My complaint is bipartisan. The Republicans are as profligate with their own favored programs and pork as are the Democrats. How can you stand up to the kid with his hand in the cookie jar when your own hand is in the same darn cookie jar? So it’s just one big non-stop Demopublican spend-fest over there in the capital.

And guess who pays the bill, my fellow Americans? Yeah, that’s right. You and me.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

I’m against poisoning innocent little girls. How about you? Oh, you’re against it too? Hey, great! But George Bush is all in favor, at least if you believe the propaganda recently being lobbed against his Administration.

One ad funded by an opposing political party that shall remain nameless features a cute little girl with a cup of water in her hand. She looks into the camera and asks, “May I please have some more arsenic in my water, Mommy?”

Charming, isn’t it? Apparently Democrats think Clinton was happily poisoning children for most of his Administration, because this all has to do with a last-minute rule imposed by Bill Clinton. The rule required that the water supply have no more than 10 parts per billion of arsenic, instead of no more than 50 parts per billion.

The Bush administration has set the costly new rule aside. Therefore, he is out to poison little girls.

But toxicologists will tell you, the dose makes the poison, otherwise we’d all be dropping like flies already. There have always been natural traces of all kinds of “poisons” in the environment and in our bodies. And there is just no scientific evidence that 50 parts per billion of arsenic poses a health risk.

Even if politicians disagree over the science, is it fair to imply that Mr. Bush is eager to poison little girls? Well, no . . . but this is the kind of demagoguery career politicians of every party practice when they’re desperate to hold onto power. Honest public policy starts with honest debate.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Monday, May 7, 2001

If the career politicians were going to stop term limits anywhere, they were going to stop them in Florida. The “Eight is Enough” term limit initiative passed with 77 percent of the vote.

But that wasn’t good enough for the politicians, who spent years suing the voters to stop term limits. Finally the Florida Supreme Court said no, the voters knew what they were doing; the term limits stand.

But no career politician worth his salt is going to let the voters enjoy their democratic victory unmolested, right? So now the Florida careerists not only want to extend their potential stay in office from 8 years to 12: they also want to increase the length of each individual term.

Under a proposed ballot measure, House terms would be 4 years instead of 2; Senate terms would be 6 years instead of 4. Senate Majority Leader Tom Rossin, the measure’s sponsor, says that, quote, “one reason the Senate is more [deliberative] than the House is that we have 4 years instead of 2. You’re not looking over your shoulder saying, ‘Am I going to get in trouble?'”

Uh, excuse me? Get in trouble with whom the voters? The logical conclusion of this sort of reasoning is that the politicians should just serve for life, and never have to concern themselves with those pesky voters at all.

Max Linn, president of Florida Citizens for Term Limits, has the best response to this kind of malarkey. He says: “Eight is enough and borders on too much.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

I love sports statistics, don’t you? I love to hear about batting averages and home runs, how many touchdowns, etc.

But some of the stats are not so groovy. I’m thinking of numbers reported by the National Taxpayers Union.

According to a recent NTU study by Paul Gessing, when you tally up all the taxpayer-subsidized funding of stadium construction over the last decade, the taxpayer strikes out to the tune of $7.5 billion. That’s not an inspiring statistic.

And it’s not as if teams are struggling. Between 1990 and 2000, the average Major League Baseball player’s salary jumped 243 percent. The average National Football League player’s salary increased 143 percent. Meanwhile, taxpayers often have to shell out hundreds of millions of dollars for just one stadium in a big city.

Of course, what owners pay the players is their business. And of course, these tax dollars are our business. Something’s not quite kosher here. Don’t we already pay for tickets to get into the game? And if we watch our sports on television, don’t we already have to put up with the commercials that pay for the airtime?

It seems to me that if team owners want our support, they should ask us to give that support voluntarily, not demand that Uncle Sam extract it from our paychecks. As Gessing points out, the latter doesn’t seem quite sporting.

In recent years governments have made a small start getting the poorest of us off welfare. Now maybe it’s time to end welfare for the wealthiest.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

One man’s pork is another man’s juicy steak. Anyway, it’s all part of the political process.

Pork, steak, corned beef hash whatever you want to call it, it’s inevitable. So inevitable that reporter David Baumann, in a recent issue of National Journal, tells us that “if members didn’t push for projects in their own districts, one could seriously question whether they were doing their jobs.”

According to Baumann, district-specific federal spending seems more reasonable up close than it does from a distance. Close up, it looks more like nutritious steak than fatty and wasteful pork.

Consider Congressman John Myers, who for many years was not persuaded of the merits of a $182 million “railroad relocation project” in Lafayette, Indiana even though the railroad was blocking traffic. But in 1981, because of re-districting, Myers suddenly found himself representing Lafayette. And guess what? Using federal tax dollars to move the railroad suddenly made more sense. Well, it was blocking traffic, after all.

But is pork-barreling just inevitable? Well, maybe if you’re a career politician more worried about getting ahead than doing the right thing.

But not every congressman is an opportunistic careerist. During his brief tenure in the Congress, South Carolina’s Mark Sanford, who limited his congressional stay to three terms, was criticized for supporting spending cuts that affected his own district. He tells the story in his book, The Trust Committed to Me. Was Sanford “failing to do his job”? Or was he doing the right thing instead of the easy thing?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

It makes you wonder: Don’t the politicians want California to recover from its energy crisis? A few years ago, California legislators took power grids away from power companies, told them to buy power in an uncontrolled wholesale market, and slapped controls on the prices they could charge consumers. The result: rolling blackouts.

Want to create a shortage? Just cap the price of a commodity below what it would have been on an open market. Demand will jump, supply will slump, profits will disappear, production will decline, and everybody will be unhappy. Markets give people what they need only when markets are free to operate. Okay, so the problems in California have confirmed Economics 101 yet again. So what’s the solution? Impose even more price controls!

Federal regulators are ordering new price caps on California electricity, to take effect whenever the supply falls below seven percent. In other words, when the supply gets very low, we’re gonna make sure we have rolling blackouts. Huh? Sad to say, career politicians and their friends in the bureaucracy often don’t even try to solve problems. They’re afraid to say, “Hey, prices are going to go up. That’s what happens when supply falls and demand increases. You’ll need to let those prices rise if you want to see new production, larger supply, and lower prices over the long run.”

But instead of showing leadership, our leaders would rather blame the power companies and promise the people cheap electricity. At least, whenever the lights are on.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

What’s the point of democracy? Isn’t it to delegate authority to representatives who then discuss and debate the issues, vote their conscience and so forth? Or are these so-called representatives just supposed to follow the orders of one guy at the top? Californians still remember how Gray Davis groused about his democratic burdens after taking office as governor.

Davis complained that the folks in the legislature had a, quote, “totally different view of the world than I do, totally different. . . . People expect government to reflect the vision that I suggested. Nobody else in the Legislature ran statewide. Their job is to implement my vision. That is their job.”

Wow. Casual dinner-party remarks caught secretly on tape? Nope words uttered to a roomful of newspaper editors. Later, Davis floated a similar theme about the judges he had appointed, saying, sure, they’ve got to follow the law, blah blah blah, but they must do it in a way that, “keeps faith with my electoral mandate.” Maybe he should just fax them instructions for each case.

Now Davis and his ego are grappling with a power shortage. Instead of working to repeal the market-distorting regulations that got California into this mess in the first place, the governor decided to get the state into the business of buying electricity. Davis was positive this would be a short-term thing, but months later the state’s involvement is still draining the treasury. I guess when the only person you listen to is yourself, it’s hard to get a second opinion.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Hey, congratulations, Senator Robert Byrd! Gosh, what an honor for you, sir. It seems that the West Virginia Senator is a proud recipient of the Porker of the Month Award.

Citizens Against Government Waste distributes the Award each month to the congressmen who are most bodacious when it comes to lugging federal funds back home at the expense of the rest of the country. Byrd has been perched in the Senate since 1959. He has cast more than 15,000 votes. So he knows what it takes to be an irresponsible spender of other people’s money.

West Virginia is one of the top five states in pork per capita. A great achievement, sort of. Byrd is spending our money on recreation areas, theater revitalization, airport fences, documentaries, etc. Any one of these projects might have some value in and of itself, of course. And as the unrepentant Senator Byrd likes to chirp, “One man’s pork is another man’s job.” Of course, West Virginia continues to be one of the poorest states in the nation. But never mind about that.

In fact, the most important impact of pork is what we don’t see: the jobs that aren’t created when our money is spent on the projects that Byrd likes instead of on the projects that we like. If the people of West Virginia want to appreciate what Byrd has brought them, they can go out to one of the rest areas off the highway and inspect one of these $100,000 restroom facilities up close. It’s like winning the lottery . . . or is it?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.