Category Archives: regulation

“Who Needs 1,000 Social Security Offices?”

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Who, indeed? Blair Levin and Larry Downes, 2010 US National Broadband Plan director and author, respectively, asked that question in their Sunday op-ed. After all, they insist

Online resources often can provide more information than local offices—and are always open. People are already moving to the internet for government interactions. In 2023, more than 90% of federal tax returns were filed electronically, up from 57% in 2007.

Levin and Downes have misunderstood the problems—all three of the ones they mention, without recognition, in that cite. That online sources are always open and social security offices are not, in this narrow case, is wholly irrelevant. The number of social security-related problems that must be resolved immediately, that can’t wait past the weekend, much less overnight, is vanishingly small—as my statistics professor used to say, the number is a good approximation of zero.

That online sources can provide more information than local offices is a good description of government bureaucrats’ failure to perform—those bureaucrats centrally located in their cushy Beltway offices, not the hard workers in those thousand satellite offices. It’s not that hard to keep the local offices current on all the data they need to handle the problems that come their way promptly, efficiently, and accurately.

Touting the rate of electronically filed Federal tax returns is simply risible. The IRS is one of the worst offenders with their lack of seriousness in protecting Americans’ tax data, either from being hacked or from being deliberately leaked (yes, the latest leaker is going to jail—that undoes his leak how, exactly?).

And this bit of Levin-Downes foolishness (not naïveté):

There is an important quid to this quo. Some of the billions of dollars saved by closing inefficient local offices will have to be spent improving federal computer systems[.]

Remind me again about the number of decades the IRS has been “upgrading” its computers and COBOL programming language how many billions of taxpayer dollars the IRS has spent on its pretense? For how long DoD has been pretending to “upgrade” computer systems at the Pentagon, at subordinate headquarters, in field units?

Levin and Downes were careful to point out that

[r]elocating the federal government online isn’t a new idea.

No, it isn’t. It was a bad idea at the outset, and it’s an even worse idea in today’s cyber world. In the coming expansion of the current cyber war, a war we’re losing currently (recall the PRC’s widespread hack of our Federal government’s databases, Russia’s closure of Colonial Pipeline with a cyber attack, and the PRC’s just exposed (not unwound) hack of so many of our telephone companies’ databases, to name just a few), how will our government function when our Internet connections are shutdown, or the databases contaminated in an overt expansion? Even if the Internet connections that would properly keep our manned satellite offices properly [sic] plussed up were cut off, those offices still would be able to function for a good long time on the data they had at the time of the shutdown and the data they would manually accumulate locally.

Even simple weather-related failures like the Great Northeast Blackout of 1965, repeated (only worse) in 2003, and the Texas winter of 2021 have (or would have) cut off millions of Americans from an otherwise intact Internet for days into weeks.

Who, indeed, needs 1,000 Social Security offices open, I ask again. We do. We need the government office (and not just of Social Security) dispersal, and we need the manual backup.

More Progressive-Democrat Lies

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This time by Jennifer Granholm, Energy Secretary for the Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden. The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are too timid polite to characterize her claims as anything other than “she’s wrong,” but as one of those So Much Smarter Than Us, Granholm knew and knows better; she is lying to us. Here are the unhappy totals (sorry, Jack Brickhouse), prompted by a just-released DoE report on the effects of exporting liquified natural gas.

  • Granholm: exporting more LNG would boost US natural gas, electricity, and product prices.
  • Her Lie Exposed: US gas prices are hovering near record lows even as exports have surged. That’s because growing US production has more than offset domestic demand.
  • G: more US exports aren’t needed since the world will soon be awash in gas.
  • L: Europeans and Japanese disagree, and the DOE study stresses that “US LNG has played a role in enhancing supply security for markets looking to reduce coal in their energy mix while prioritizing both renewables and gas.”
  • G: US LNG would “displace more renewables than coal globally.”
  • L: The study finds that US LNG would mostly displace fossil fuels and at most increase global CO2 emissions cumulatively by 0.05% through 2050.

This is yet another reason why we wouldn’t have nice things under the reign of the Progressive-Democratic Party.

I Have Questions

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Under subpoena, the far Left fundraiser ActBlue gave up documents to the House Administration Committee that showed that ActBlue did not begin automatically rejecting foreign donations (which I take to mean the organization made no serious effort at all) until last September.

Committee Chairman Bryan Steil (R, WI):

The documents provided to the Committee also confirm that ActBlue still accepted these concerning payment methods in July, a period when Democrats raised a record number of campaign money before implementing these safeguards.

My questions: to which Progressive-Democrats did ActBlue forward the money?

How much of those illegally accepted and then forwarded funds have those Progressive-Democrats returned to the donors, either directly or through ActBlue?

Not Necessarily

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The Supreme Court has the case of Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v Eagle County, which concerns an 88-mile railway bringing oil and farm goods out of rural Utah. It’s wholly contained within Utah. Colorado’s Eagle County is suing to block the Utah railway on the claim that the National Environmental Policy Act required the Surface Transportation Board to

analyze possible impacts as far away as the Gulf Coast, where the exported oil might be refined, and the environmental effects of “long-term employment and commercial activity” resulting from the railway.

The DC Circuit (! not the 10th Circuit, which includes both Utah and Colorado) agreed with Eagle County, which is why the case now is in front of the Supreme Court.

The Seven County argument is that

it shouldn’t have to analyze the environmental impact of anything not directly associated with railroads. It should be responsible only for the “proximate effects” of development over which it has regulatory authority.

The WSJ editors went on at length about why and how circuit ruling should be reversed, but they began with this:

[E]stablishing a predictable principle to guide future decisions about infrastructure development and prevent further litigation will be difficult. Litigants will have to parry a barrage of unpredictable hypotheticals….

Not necessarily. The guiding principle is clearly laid out by the Seven Counties: if the alleged environmental impact of a thing isn’t directly associated with that thing, there’s no analysis needed of that allegation. Full stop.

Regarding those “unpredictables,” there already is case law barring speculative lawsuits. Indeed, the Supreme Court already has repeatedly held that agencies needn’t consider indirect and unpredictable impact, most recently in Department of Transportation v Public Citizen. If litigation still gets out of hand, SLAP sanctions are available.

Eagle County’s case is just another of those quibbles for interference’s sake that the Court needs to stoutly chastise along with reversing the DC Circuit’s ruling.

Prop Up That Industry

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German Chancellor Olaf Scholz wants more government pressure on support for battery cars, their manufacture, and their sale to an uninterested public.

German chancellor Olaf Scholz has called for the introduction of Europe-wide measures to increase uptake of electric vehicles, in a speech at Ford Motor Corp’s factory in Cologne, just weeks after the US car maker outlined plans to lay off 4,000 of its European workers.
In the speech at Ford’s EV factory on Tuesday, Scholz argued Germany should work to facilitate the “leap forward” towards “electromobility” by providing “support” for the country’s car industry, including by subsidizing energy costs for EV battery makers.

And this bit of contradiction:

Scholz said the support for the car industry should also aim to protect worker’s jobs….

He can’t have it both ways, except through government-mandated featherbedding. It takes fewer workers to build an electric motor and a battery car than it does an ICE motor and an ICE-powered car. It takes fewer suppliers to supply fewer parts, and fewer employees at each supplier, to provide the simpler components of a battery car than the more complex components of an ICE car.

The ripples go on from there: secondarily, all those mom-and-pop stores—diners, grocery stores, bars, entertainment venues, and so on—will get fewer customers from those smaller work forces at the EV factories and supplier plants, resulting in fewer mom-and-pops and fewer employees in surviving mom-and-pops.

No. If the battery car industry still needs overt government fiscal subsidies and mandates aimed at pressuring consumers to spend their own money on even subsidized battery cars, those vehicles and that industry aren’t ready for operation.

The only legitimate support for battery cars is the consumers’ interest in buying them in a free, competitive market shorn of government pressures. That interest isn’t yet there.