Tag: Congress

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national politics & policies too much government

Wanting Too Much

An old joke runs something like this:

    “We lose a dollar on every widget sold.”
    “So how do you stay in business?”
    “We make up for it in volume.”

The lesson? Mere numerical productivity is not key to the success of any human enterprise. Adding value is key. Quality counts. And profit.

Tell that to Ezra Klein. He measures Congress by how many laws it makes. The current Congress has made very few laws compared to previous ones — Klein has a very nifty graph of this, see at right — so Klein blasts Congress: “there’s no session of Congress with such a poor record of productivity.”

But it’s not gross-​weight productivity that counts. As economist David Henderson perceptively noted, what matters is whether the laws are good or not.

The more laws we’re encumbered with, the less their quality. Or as Cicero once put it: “The more laws, the less justice.”

Laws carry the weight of force, and force is the opposite of freedom, so the more the laws, the less the freedom. Further, it’s almost impossible to manage the huge bulk of the legal code, leading to bureaucratic drudgery both in and out of government, and mismanagement of resources everywhere. At best, we wind up with only piecemeal enforcement, which is itself a temptation for a common sort of tyranny, the prosecution of folks someone in power doesn’t like.

Note that graph. Each session adds to existing law. And unlike spending feeding debt, which is at least somewhat offset by revenues, these laws tend not to be the repeal of old laws. Graph the accumulation of laws, and it goes only one direction.

The wrong direction.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Fiddling in the Flames?

The president and congressional leaders came to some sort of an agreement last night. It sounded a tad vague to me. Apparently, politicians still fear taking pride in identifying actual cuts.

Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron, writing last week, argues that the deals then on the table amounted to “fiddling while Rome burned.”

The only thing surprising about the above sentence, to savvy readers, might be the suggestion that “Harvard economist” is not a contradiction in terms. But hey: Judge for yourself.

“The problem with the Democratic position is that it regards redistribution, rather than economic productivity, as the prime goal of government policy,” Miron reasonably asserts. The problem with the Republicans? A “refusal to distinguish between the tax revenue that comes from higher rates and that which comes from fixing tax loopholes that inappropriately privilege certain consumption or production.”

Higher tax rates won’t work, because “the available revenue from the wealthy is far too small. And higher taxes discourage economic growth, making deficits worse.”

But Obama’s idea of closing some loopholes is not a horrible idea, Miron argues. These so-​called loopholes are bad policy to begin with, integral, as they are, to bipartisan folly, favoring some folk at the expense of the rest. Picking winners — what some tart up as “industrial policy,” but most of us identify as “buying votes.”

Miron says that Medicare, though, is the biggest ongoing fiscal destabilizer. Cuts must be made there.

Those will likely be the hardest to secure.

This is Common SEnse. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies political challengers term limits

Congressional Stagnation at an End?

With this last election, 87 percent of House incumbents who chose to run for re-​election got re-elected.

That’s low by modern standards. In fact, it’s the lowest since 1970, which garnered 85 percent rates for incumbents.

But it’s high by older standards. Eric O’Keefe, of the Sam Adams Alliance, says that the re-​election rate may be low today but remains higher “than every election of the 19th century.”

Something changed. Individual career politicians gained the upper hand. 

On the brighter side, it’s worth noting that if you include “voluntary retirement” in current figures, the turnover rate was much higher. Forty-​five open House seats saw 16 flips of party affiliation, all but one going from Democrat to Republican. This leads Doug Mataconis to figure the retention rate at 64 percent. (Still, in the 19th century, that same rate averaged to under 60 percent.)

Of course, many of our recent “voluntary retirees” may have seen the writing on the wall, preferring to bow out with more dignity than an electoral trouncing would allow.

Credit this to an exceptional frisson amongst the voting public, born of anger and disgust at the political class’s habitual over-​spending and general foolishness. 

It remains to be seen whether this acuity of citizen focus can alone spur continued turnover and real change. It seems unlikely, which is why I’ve long supported term limits.

But, whatever the source, real change is necessary. And the current turnover, welcome.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

The Bill With No Name

It’s not legislation out of a Clint Eastwood western. It’s a congressional bill with the somewhat sketchy cognomen of the “_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​ Act of ________.”

This non-​name may also front the law as eventually foisted. The Senate is in recess until September, so there might not be a chance to correct the title in both houses. To be signed into law, a bill must pass both chambers in identical form.

WashingtonWatch​.com reports that HR1586 would “impose an additional tax on bonuses received from certain TARP recipients” — referring to the controversial Troubled Asset Relief Program, the $700 billion bailout program of October 2008. But the nameless bill has morphed somewhat. As Jim Harper of the Cato Institute observes, it was “introduced as one thing (TARP taxes), became another thing (an aviation bill), and is now a batch of spending policies.”

Maybe it should be called the Still More of Your Money Down the Drain Act.

Merits of this $26 billion bill aside, there’s the hardly incidental question of why. The title of the Bill with No Name is the exception that symbolizes the rule, i.e. that bill-​passage is typically a rush job even when bills are thousands of pages long.

We know that many politicians want to run every aspect of our lives. Apparently it scarcely matters to them how they go about it, just slap together greater restrictions on our liberty combined with grand authorizations to spend additional billions and call it a law.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Let the Bedbugs Bite

Whenever governments interfere in the basic operation of markets, trying to “help” in some way, pretty soon an unintended effect emerges, and government must step in, again, to correct for that. And that second, corrective intervention then causes another problem, requiring yet another intervention. And so on.

This process of intervention-​upon-​intervention was detailed by economist Ludwig von Mises, and explained with elaborate reasoning. Since Mises’ day, the history of economic interventionism is littered with examples that reinforce Mises’ point.

Take bedbugs.

In 2008, I noted that bedbug infestations were on the rise. And that Congress was working to combat the problem with a special program.

I suggested that Congress should stay out of it.

What I didn’t know was that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was hard at work … in effect defending bedbugs. The EPA regulates pesticides. The cheapest and most effective anti-​bedbug pesticide had come up for re-​registration for home use. But the company that makes it decided not to re-​register. The cumbersome, bureaucratic re-​testing process cost too much, taking away the company’s incentive to sell the chemical. 

So now in Ohio — an apparently bedbug-​conscious state — the State Senate is petitioning the EPA to get a special exemption for this one product. No word from the EPA yet.

So, if a bedbug infestation breaks out big time, don’t blame Congress for not spending enough. Blame the EPA. Or blame the body responsible for the EPA. Yup, Congress. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
government transparency national politics & policies

Democrats Give the Internet to the FTC?

Congress has all the backbone of a jellyfish. Tasked with sole power to declare war, it delegates such decision-​making to the Executive Branch every chance it gets. The U.S. hasn’t declared war since World War II, but is now engaged in two land wars in Asia. 

Further, for a long time, Congress has handed over law-​writing tasks to various regulatory divisions of the Executive Branch. This may have gotten worse with the recent Democratic hegemony. Example? Congress is maneuvering to give the Internet over to the Federal Trade Commission.

Pelosi’s little platoons have hidden this momentous change in the recent banking regulation bill. But as Ed Morrissey of Hotair​.com notes, the Internet had nothing to do with the recent financial collapse, another iteration of which the new bill is ostensibly designed to prevent

So why sneak this provision into an unrelated bill?

Maybe to come down on one side of the Net Neutrality debate without ever really confronting the issues. 

People engaged in this debate about regulating Internet and bandwidth pricing may disagree about a lot of things, but surely they all agree that Congress should legislate for the Internet openly and honestly, not make its biggest decisions in obscure provisions of a measure that will be voted on only to solve utterly unrelated problems.

You may be thinking, FCC, FTC — does it matter? Well, I bet it really matters to some powerful Democrat. Hence the sneaky maneuvers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.