Tag: Washington Post

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Startling Subsidy Success

“Moving on from unfulfilling jobs, thanks to health-​care law,” was the gleeful headline* on the story spoon-​fed to The Washington Post by Families USA, a pro-​Obamacare group that maintains a “database of people who have benefitted” from the law (a pretty easy gig, no doubt).

Polly Lower quit her job and says, “It was wonderful.” She didn’t want the job anymore, because she went from “doing payroll, which she liked, to working on her boss’s schedule, which she loathed.”

Take this job and …

Eddie Gonzales-​Novoa left a job making $88,000 annually, because he wanted to help a cancer-​surviving relative start a website for others battling the disease. Now he makes very little, but has more rewarding employment.

Well, if they can afford not to work or to make less in order to do what they want, good for them!

But, if you pay taxes (anyone?), it might not be so good for you. Under the Affordable Care Act, both Eddie and Polly are getting their health insurance subsidized by the taxpayers.

Gonzalez-Novoa’s job change is easy to sympathize with, but why should “the taxpayers” pay for the bill? Might not they have similar dreams of their own to finance?

Lower not only didn’t like her job, she was better off without one — so she receives even more in Obamacare subsidies. She told the Washington Post that she has “adjusted well” to not working.

Sadly, the Post offered no report on how well the taxpayers are adjusting to continuing to work to pay these new subsidies to others.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Print headline was different than online headline.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

On the Wire

There’s something worse than “printing the myth”: printing government press releases and calling that “journalism.”

In those cases where folks in today’s news media do get their watchdog legs underneath them and yet their questions go unanswered, we citizens need be mightily concerned.

“The Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment,” the Washington Post reported yesterday.

What did they refuse to comment on?

Wiretap stats.

Spokespeople for the Obama Administration have been repeating incessantly that we ought not worry about them grabbing all our phone and Internet and financial information and communications. After all, they tell us, to actually delve into that mountain of metadata to gaze at your personal stuff, the Feds have to lug a rubber stamp across town to a secret court to get approval.

But, lo and behold: the Administrative Office of the United States Court released figures on the number of federal wiretaps in criminal investigations, showing that wiretaps had spiked up 71 percent in 2012. Such wiretaps by state and local police increased only 5 percent.

The average number of federal wiretaps between 1997 and 2009 were 550. But in 2010 the number soared to 1,207. The number went down to 792 the next year and then shot back up to 1,354 last year — a 147 percent increase over the 1997 – 2009 period.

The report further notes that “A single wiretap can sweep up thousands of communications.” For instance, one wiretap in Los Angeles intercepted more than 185,000 calls — nine of every ten deemed non-incriminating.

Why worry about governments having too much power? Governments have been known to use the power.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
incumbents media and media people

Spring Cleaning

For the fifth year in a row, the Washington Post has offered readers a two-​page spread, “Spring Cleaning: 10 Things to Toss Out,” featuring ten people on what to cleanse from our society.

Also for the fifth time, the Post’s email asking for my “thing” was obviously snagged by my spam filter. Computers!

Still, ten is a number I can easily count to — here’s the Post’s list:

  1. Ben Bernanke? The measure carries! Wait … do we get to vote?
  2. Compliments? Really? Well … good try.
  3. Retweets are not endorsements? Skip.
  4. Flip-​flops? Wrong channel.
  5. Innovation? Love it. And yet I look forward to the new, upgraded version of any computer program like a shot of the Ebola virus with a long, dirty needle.
  6. Red Lines? Foreign Policy’s Editor Susan B. Glasser tossed out red lines, noting that in Syria “The ‘red line’ has been crossed … And Obama is backed into a predictable corner.” By all means, if the Great O cannot live up to his red-​line proclamations, let’s been done with such lines. And the color red, too.
  7. The term “Working Mother”? Meaning: ALL mothers are working mothers. Heck, I can testify; I probably made the mess.
  8. College Rankings? It’s unanimous.
  9. Texas? Couldn’t we just move the Dallas Cowboys from the Eastern Division of the National Football Conference so Washington doesn’t have to play them?
  10. Automatic Tax Withholding? This was Milton Friedman’s idea to get money into the government faster during World War II. Since regretted. But not going anywhere anytime soon.

Too bad that doggone email didn’t arrive, but let me present the eleventh thing to toss out: Career politicians.

Time again to clean both House and Senate.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability national politics & policies too much government

Sequester Squeezes Solons

The deep, excruciating pain inflicted by the infamous sequester’s automatic $85 billion in spending cuts is beginning to crush the spirit of our glorious leaders.

Every stroke of the pen hurts, as congressional budgets are slashed a mindless 8.2 percent. The resultant chaos, we are told, presents a fatal threat to our survival as a nation.

A recent Washington Post exposé revealed more than a few of the budget-​cutting horrors:

  • Congressional offices are wantonly canceling magazine subscriptions. Magazines contain important facts desperately needed by those entrusted with governing every aspect of our existence. Denied essential reading material, national literacy levels could plummet.
  • Communication between congressional representatives and their constituents is being disrupted as offices increasingly respond through low cost e‑mail, instead of mailing through the more expensive U.S. Post Office.
  • Foreign junkets are also getting scrutinized. For instance, the congressional delegation sent to Rome to welcome the new pope dared the indignity of flying commercial.

It has gotten so bad that U.S. Rep. John Campbell (R‑Calif.) was forced to actually look into the phone bill paid by his congressional office. He found he could save $200 a month.

The sickening reality of budget cuts? They always hit our poor leaders hardest. But somehow, without magazines or lavish junkets, forced to use email and fly commercial and occasionally peruse a bill, our solons bravely carry on.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
media and media people national politics & policies

A Surplus of Slant

The Washington Post Metro section headline seems to tell a story: “Virginia taxes yield $311 million surplus.”

Odd, though: Virginia’s legislators didn’t raise taxes; they cut spending. The article, thankfully, reveals this, reporting that there was “no general tax increase” and “hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts.” 

But if you just read the headline and moved on, you might have been misled. 

Later that day, CNN charges Congresswoman Michele Bachmann with “again” characterizing “a settlement to black farmers as fraud.” No explanation as to why. Then CNN presents John Boyd (or Dr. John Boyd?), president of the National Black Farmers Association.

Boyd denies all talk of fraud. “I just don’t understand why people like Ms. Bachmann … have continued to criticize this settlement,” he explains, before figuring it might be to “divide and conquer America.”

Rep. Bachmann is shown saying 94,000 people were given settlement money even though the census showed only 18,000 black farmers. But CNN avoids that obvious math problem. CNN also neglects the testimony of Jimmy Dismuke, a black farmer who claims the lawyers told potential plaintiffs that “if you had a potted plant, you can be a farmer.”

Then CNN anchor Kyra Phillips asks, “Do you feel that she’s racist?”

Boyd responds, “She’s going to have a hard time proving to America that she’s not racist if she continues to make these kinds of comments.”

Media folks are going to have trouble proving to America that they don’t slant the news.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture

Auto Bailouts & Obama Bombast

I never expected a Washington Post writer to so soundly assail a presidential stream of pro-​bailout nonsense.

In a “Fact Checker” column entitled “President Obama’s phony accounting on the auto industry bailout,” Glenn Kessler concludes that a “virtually every claim” by the president in recent comments about the auto industry “needs an asterisk, just like the fine print in that too-​good-​to-​be-​true car loan.”

President Barack Obama says General Motors will rehire all workers laid off during the recession. But he’s referring to only a sliver of the 68,000 employees General Motors has dropped from its work force since 2006.

Obama says Chrysler has repaid “every dime” it got from taxpayers “during my presidency” — years ahead of schedule. But he omits four billion forked over to Chrysler during the last month of the Bush presidency! So … Chrysler has repaid every dime except four billion dollars. (That’s 40 billion dimes, by the way.)

And so forth. Kessler leaves the job of analyzing the wisdom of shoveling billions of taxpayer dollars into the coffers of failing firms to others. So he doesn’t observe that capital forcibly rerouted into “creating jobs” in foundering enterprises cannot be turned to more productive uses in the more successful enterprises from which the capital was grabbed. This is another fact Obama neglects.

It’s not the 2008 presidential campaign any more. Maybe the left-​leaning press will no longer automatically bail out Obama when he distorts the truth? 

Let’s see where we are in mid-2012.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

The Housing Boom’s Inflated “Wisdom”

Watch how the received wisdom gets worded: “A sustained rebound in home prices is considered critical to getting the economy back on track.”

That’s from a Washington Post business report on falling home prices. Its passive voice construction covers up who holds the opinion. 

The sentence could have been written differently: “Many politicians, policy wonks, and industry shills believe that only a sustained rebound in housing prices can put the economy get back on track.” But that would have helped the reader see the special interests behind the statement. 

We need housing prices high and rising again … to fulfill the plans of the very people who set up the house of cards that just came down.

Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron’s reaction is worth quoting in full: “No, no, a thousand times no!

Housing prices are falling because they soared to ridiculous levels during the bubble. Any policy that attempts to keep prices high — or, equivalently, that attempts to prevent foreclosures or juice housing construction — is fighting a crucial market adjustment to past distortions.

The housing boom mania — fed by multiple government subsidies and massive financial intervention coupled with cheap money from the Federal Reserve — served some people at the expense of the public at large. Progress doesn’t depend on it. Real progress depends on rejecting such nonsense.

By the way, other things equal, inexpensive housing is good for us. The whole “rising prices” mania defeats the alleged rationale for mortgage subsidies in the first place.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
political challengers

Pardon the Vote

Over the weekend, Utah Republicans defeated three-​term incumbent U.S. Senator Robert Bennett at their state convention. Two more conservative candidates, both with support among Tea Party activists, now move on to a primary election to decide the eventual GOP nominee.

Senator Bennett’s defeat marks the first U.S. senator to be denied re-​nomination in Utah in 70 years.

The strangest part of this, though, is the strange reaction of much of the media. The morning paper says Bennett was as conservative as any rational human being could possibly desire … citing Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine. 

Kathleen Parker, the liberal Washington Post’s idea of a conservative, lectured before the vote that “Tea Partyers risk losing some of their strongest voices.” Tea Party supporters seem determined to decide for themselves which voices speak for them. 

Parker also smeared Tea Party folks as an anti-​intellectual rabble, characterizing Bennett’s long tenure in Washington to be “as disadvantageous as having an Ivy League degree. Those out-​of-​touch elites, you know.”

Touchy. Very out-​of-​touchy. Forgotten by the maven? Bennett’s old pledge to serve only two terms. 

Bennett had been seeking his fourth term. 

E.J. Dionne called the Utah result a “non-​violent coup.” Yes, just exactly like a coup — except for that voting part. 

For those counting coup right now, establishment folks are receiving a whacking. No wonder they bristle. 

Expect more.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
U.S. Constitution

Meet the Moots

The meaning of institutions, like words, changes over time.

Take Congress. The Constitution hands legislative power to the two houses of Congress. With the growth of government Congress has delegated more and more of its powers to the executive branch.

In a recent column, George F. Will identified the most recent “development” of this trend. Will’s example is the automaker bailout. Congress did not authorize it: The package failed in the Senate. But President Bush simply took money from another bailout bill and dumped it at the failing automobile manufacturers.

Even if you think the bailout is good policy, the president should be censured. “With the automakers,” Will writes, “executive branch overreaching now extends to the essence of domestic policy — spending.…

George Will’s Washington Post column is titled “Making Congress Moot.” Droll, that. “Moot” is an ancient term for a deliberative body. Philologist and fantasist J.R.R. Tolkien used it to designate his congress of “treeherders.” Remember “entmoot”?

The phrase “moot point” used to mean “open to debate.” It now usually means “an issue raised whose determination cannot have any practical effect.”

Congress has gone from an august, important deliberative body — a moot — to a mere debating society. As the meaning of the word “moot” has decayed, so too has Congress.

Think of 535 moot points.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.