Tag: Rick Perry

Categories
crime and punishment insider corruption

Texas-​sized Trouble

Texas Governor and 2012 presidential candidate Rick Perry has never been exactly “my guy.” But now he seems like a kindred spirit, having been indicted on two felony counts of … well … as the indictment states it, “threatening to veto legislation that had been approved and authorized by the Legislature of the State of Texas.”

The indictment is only two pages. Easy to read.

What seems hard to read is why a prosecutor would bring a criminal charge in a case like this.

Last year, Governor Perry publicly and transparently threatened a veto of the $7.5 million in funding for the Public Integrity Unit of the Travis County District Attorney’s office unless Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg resigned her office.

Why should she resign? Lehmberg was arrested and convicted for driving drunk and still found it necessary to behave badly in the process. Which arguably, per Gov. Perry, clashed with her continuation as head of the Public Integrity shop.

Lehmberg refused to resign and Perry vetoed the $7.5 million.

Now Perry is facing two felony charges from the same prosecutor’s office that has had other high profile cases — most famously the prosecution of Tom DeLay — end in acquittal. If convicted, he could face up to a 99-​year sentence.

Someone more “my guy,” former Texas Congressman Ron Paul, called the indictment “pure politics” and “a joke.”

He didn’t mean it was funny, though. It is a very serious signal of just how out of control our political process has become.

Governors have the constitutional veto power for a reason. Threatening a veto is standard politics. It’s their job.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Texas vs. No-​Growth Coasts

Governments must rely upon profitable businesses. Without them, government has next to nothing.

And yet “next to nothing” is what governments can do to best help businesses succeed.

Thank Texas Governor Rick Perry for these thoughts … and Matthew Yglesias, who commented on Perry’s recent “nuclear-​strength” video promotion, inviting businesses to leave places like New York and locate themselves in Texas, which has fewer regulations and no income tax. The ad claims Texas is “big for business.” Yglesias quibbles:

If New York was a terrible place to live, work, and do business, then it would be cheap to live in New York. But New York is not cheap. It’s not Detroit. It’s not even average. It’s, in fact, hellishly expensive. If New York emulated Texas and eliminated its income tax, rich people would bid up the finite supply of New York City land at an even more furious rate — the city wouldn’t see Houston or Dallas growth rates.

I’m no economist, but I have quibbles with Yglesias’s critique. New York is expensive, yes. But the cause of the expense isn’t just that people bid up housing and services. It’s expensive in no small part as a result of all those regulations, especially courtesy of one regulation in particular: rent control. Get rid of rent control and the city income tax? Watch housing grow.

And growth, Yglesias rightly points out, is what’s really in Texas’s favor. Texan low-​impact government policies favor growth, while “the residents and politicians” of blue-​state/​beach-​front states, though “liberal,” have, in fact, “become exceptionally small‑c conservative and change averse.” Because they do too much, allegedly to “help.” But mostly to gentrify.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture national politics & policies

Firing People for Fun & Profit

After winning the New Hampshire primary last night, Mitt Romney charged that “some desperate Republicans” have joined forces with President Obama “to put free enterprise on trial.”

Newt Gingrich calls Romney a “vulture capitalist” and blasted his work as CEO of Bain Capital as “bankrupting companies and laying off employees.” Rick Perry snidely attacked Mitt for “all the jobs that he killed,” adding “I’m sure he was worried he would run out of pink slips.”
Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney
A Wall Street Journal report quoted Jon Huntsman: “What is clear is [Mr. Romney] likes firing people.”

So, did Romney say “I like being able to fire people”? What he said was, “I want individuals to have their own insurance. That means the insurance company will have an incentive to keep you healthy. It also means if you don’t like what they do, you can fire them. I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.”

I, too, like being able to fire companies who don’t adequately supply the services I demand.

Yet, what about Romney’s work at Bain Capital?

Bain Capital took firms having trouble making a profit and attempted to make them more profitable. Sometimes that meant cutting back the work force to avoid bankruptcy, where everyone would lose their jobs. Sometimes it meant cutting up a company and its assets and selling them to entrepreneurs who could do better.

Not all businesses succeed. No surprise, then, that politicians used to spending a seemingly unlimited supply of other people’s money regardless of performance fail to understand this simple reality.

To his credit, Ron Paul defended Romney, saying of Gingrich, Huntsman and Perry, “I think they’re wrong. They are either just demagoguing or they don’t have the vaguest idea how the market works.”

Or both.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ballot access

Easy to Be Hard

Politicians often try to pass laws making it more difficult for citizens to petition issues onto the ballot, claiming that it’s too easy to gather all those signatures.

Speaking of easy, that’s awfully easy for politicians to say.

If they’re major party candidates, Democrats or Republicans, they usually don’t have to come up with any voter signatures at all to place themselves on the ballot. Even in the few states that require major party candidates to gather signatures, the numbers are nominal, a few hundred at most.

Funny, we certainly don’t hear former House Speaker Newt Gingrich or Texas Governor Rick Perry prattling on about how simple and carefree it is to gather thousands of signatures. That’s because presidential ballot access is sometimes much more difficult and both candidates just failed to collect the required 10,000 valid signatures to gain a spot on the Virginia ballot as Republican presidential candidates.

To place a statutory issue on the 2010 ballot in Nevada, a state sporting about a quarter of Virginia’s population, required 97,000 signatures. That’s ten times more than demanded of Gingrich and Perry. To place a statutory measure on the Arizona ballot requires 172,809 signatures; a constitutional amendment needs 259,213.

Governor Perry is challenging Virginia’s unconstitutional law banning non-​residents from helping collect signatures. I hope he wins. But maybe the best way to prevent legislators from passing laws that make petitioning too difficult is to make those laws apply to them and how they get on the ballot.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.