Tag Archives: government

Disaster Relief

Posted on by
Reply

Government can’t do it.  This isn’t the fault of liberal government or conservative government—government can’t do it.  Only private enterprise and the community of individual volunteers can.

Look at the failures of government response to Katrina, including the failures of the governor of Louisiana and the mayor of New Orleans to do anything at all other than to cry out for Federal relief—and in the case of Governor Kathleen Blanco, a failure to do even that until it was too late for the Feds to be even a little useful.  Then there’s the failure of the Federal relief efforts.  There remain temporary homes in Louisiana depots unused because of bureaucratic failure to get them emplaced and allocated, just as one example.

Private enterprise—Wal*Mart (food, clothing donations, delivery truck capacity), Home Depot (support centers for providing reconstruction materials), Ford Motor (160 used trucks, vans and SUVs for use in the relief effort)—arrived promptly with its own relief effort in progress by the time the Feds arrived.

Private charity and NGO—The American Red Cross, Feeding America (then America’s Second Harvest), Southern Baptist Convention, Salvation Army, Oxfam, Common Ground Collective, Emergency Communities, Habitat for Humanity, Catholic Charities, Service International, “A River of Hope”, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and many others charitable organizations had major roles in the relief effort.

Individual volunteers with expertise—electrical power restoral, flood relief and water damage repair—flowed in from out of the disaster area.

Look at the manifest failures of the governor of New York, the mayor of New York City, and the Federal government with Sandy.  There are lots of photo ops, many tours of the disaster areas, an initial attempt to divert massive police, sanitation, etc resources from relief effort and residential neighborhood security to support a marathon race.  And millions of Americans in New York and New Jersey still are without power, heat, clear roads, fuel for their transportation, even homes.

On the other hand, Verizon, for instance, had 95% of its cell service back up and running within 24 hours of Sandy’s landfall in the affected areas.  AT&T, et al., weren’t far behind.  Home Depot (those guys again) has activated its Disaster Response Command Center and is coordinating merchandise movement and working with the Red Cross (those guys again) for relief effort.  Wal*Mart, by last weekend alone, had donated 60 pallets of dry food and beverages and nearly 6,000 cases of cleaning supplies.

Private charity and NGO—all those listed above—are active in their own roles.

Volunteer utility workers have flowed in to help with power restoral, marathon runners, with their contest cancelled, switched to doing their own resupply efforts to beleaguered neighborhoods, relying on shank’s mare to get supplies in where motorized delivery couldn’t go.

William McGurn, writing in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, argues that these failures demonstrate the failures of liberal government.  From this conservative’s perspective, McGurn makes some good points:

…the great vulnerability of 21st-century American liberalism: an inability to set the priorities necessary for good government.  As a result, government grows both bigger and less capable, especially for people who do not have the resources to fund other options.

He’s right as far as he goes, but as I opened this post, this isn’t a failure of liberal government alone—it’s a failure of government.  This isn’t because the wrong people have the wrong ideas, but because the idea is wrong.  Government cannot do disaster recovery.

Government has an important role to play in disaster recovery, but that role is coordination; assistance in allocation of effort and resources; short-term, stop-gap, hand up funding.  It is not the doing itself.  As I wrote here,

Government didn’t build anything; it just acted as middle man for a small part of all that private building.

Disaster relief is just a subset of that building.

When Greed Meets Tinker Bell

Posted on by
Reply

State pension funds are another time bomb of malaise (to the tune of a $1.4 trillion shortfall) waiting to explode, and Rhode Island provides an example of the difficulty we each, in our own state, face in defusing it.

Rhode Island passed a massive overhaul (as such things go; they have a long way, yet, before they’ve completely cured their problem) of their state retirement system last year, including such unheard-ofs as raising the retirement age, suspending pension increases for several years, and generating a hybrid retirement plan that combines traditional pensions with 401(k)-like accounts.  Rhode Island’s General Treasurer, Gina Raimondo, says that this reform will save Rhode Islanders $4 billion over the next 20 years (compared to a 2013 budget that proposes spending $8 billion in that year alone, small potatoes, indeed, but a critical start).  This minor reform also seeks to redress astonishing conditions that include 58 percent of retired teachers and 48 percent of state retirees receiving more in their pensions than in their final years of work.

But it’s too much change for some.  The public “service” unions (service: you service me) object: it’s somehow wrong for their members to be responsible for their own retirement funding.  Even a little bit.  Instead, these public “service” unions protest that it’s all unfair.  Rhode Island is reneging on promises to workers, they say.  Bob Walsh, Executive Director of the National Education Association of Rhode Island, goes so far as to insist

What they did was illegal.  We’re deep into a real assault on labor.  It worries me that people who purport themselves as Democrats do this.

Never mind that there’s nothing at all illegal about these changes.  It’s a well-established principle in American jurisprudence that when the conditions extant when a contract was agreed (stipulating arguendo that the agreement was made in good faith by all parties) no longer exist, or have so radically changed that the terms can no longer be met, the contract can be abrogated and either a new one negotiated or the parties involved go their separate ways.  In extreme cases, this is what bankruptcy achieves; although, when the conditions have changed as radically as these have, bankruptcy isn’t necessary.

Never mind, also, these are promises that couldn’t be kept in any event, and both the state government and the public “service” unions at the time knew they could not be kept.  Or they blindly believed real hard in government’s ability to keep collecting funds from…somewhere.  Tinker Bell is alive and well in Public Service Land.

Never mind, finally, that this public “service” union greed at the expense of taxpayers makes “labor” a valid target.

One tear-jerker that the unions are trotting out is this:

North Providence retiree Jamie Reilly left her job as a secretary at age 50 [remember that raising of the retirement age?], thinking her 30 years of state employment would mean good benefits during her later years.  But now she said she may be forced to re-enter the workforce at age 55 because the state has put off pension increases.

“I counted on that money,” Reilly said….  “You work all your life and you plan, and they take it away from you.”

Worked all her life?  She worked 30 years and wanted to be retired for 40.  Workers in the private sector don’t get it that easy; they work until they’re in their mid-60s—a working life 50% longer.

And this one:

Cranston firefighter Dean Brockway said higher retirement ages mean he will have to work several years longer than he expected, and he wonders how he’ll climb stairs in heavy gear in his 60s.

“Could I do something else? I don’t know,” he said. “A lot of us chose to dedicate our lives to public service because to us it’s an honor.  Could I be a carpenter?  I don’t think so. This is what I do.”

Brockway has a legitimate concern, but it’s no different from the concerns of a private sector employee whose work is primarily physical labor.  But if he’s not going to look for alternatives, if he’s not going to try to retrain into something less physically demanding (certainly no stroll in the park for a middle-aged or older person, but assuredly not impossible), he loses sympathy for his plight, which begins to be self-imposed.  Certainly, there’s no more obligation for Rhode Island’s citizens to indemnify him against the outcomes of his choices than there is for them to indemnify similarly situated private sector employees.

Raimondo understands this in all its practicalities—how affordable are the existing programs:

These problems won’t go away.  The longer you wait, the bigger the problems get.  People looking for easy, short-term solutions. … Well, there are none.

Raimondo doesn’t believe in Tinker Bell.

Some Thoughts on the Fed’s Latest Guess at Monetary Policy

Posted on by
Reply

The good folks at Sober Look have a good post on this.  Basically, the Fed’s latest scheme is to buy $40 billion of mortgage debt from lenders every month until the labor market improves.  That’s nearly a trillion dollars every two years.  And its purpose is to hold down mortgage interest rates in particular, rather than interest rates in general, which have already been artificially lowered to near zero (to negative values in some cases in real, inflation-adjusted terms) for several years.

Those nearly non-existent interest rates generally, though, are associated with 43 months of unemployment above 8% (notwithstanding last week’s Labor Department claim of 7.8% unemployment).  Here’s what Sober Look thinks of this latest…idea…from the Fed.  Follow the links, too.

  1. It is not clear what impact asset purchases will have on consumer confidence.
  2. We’ve had extraordinarily low interest rates for quite some time now, yet improvements in job growth have been limited.
  3. Lowering mortgage rates from 3.5% to 3% is not going to have a significant impact on home affordability or materially reduce consumers’ interest expense (see this discussion).
  4. Raising bank excess reserves is not going to accelerate credit expansion.
  5. Fed’s unemployment targets are unrealistic – it’s going to be an exercise in “squeezing blood from a stone” (see discussion).
  6. US real median household income has basically been unchanged since 1994. The Fed’ program is unlikely to improve this metric and could actually impair incomes further by elevating inflation levels.
  7. The market “euphoria” effect is fleeting.

What will restore employment is less government interference—by the Fed and the Congress and the Executive—in our economy so that free market forces can start an actual recovery.  Which will lead to increased hiring; leading to more savings (in absolute terms, if not relatively), which are funds that can be loaned to support home purchases or business expansion (each of which is jobs) and to more spending, which supports business expansion (which is jobs); leading to increased hiring; leading to….

Lies of my President, Part 7

Posted on by
Reply

This is Part 7 of my series on the lies told by Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama in the nearly four years in which he’s been in office.  As I said earlier, I’m not concerned with his broken campaign promises so much as I am with his dishonesty while in office.

Recall Obama’s promise of the most open and transparent administration in history.  This is how he’s carried out that “promise.”

Here’s secret collusion between the (publicly) hated health-care industry and the White House underlying the development of Obamacare.  These emails were sent in early/mid-June of 2009:

From: Jeffrey Kindler [Pfizer CEO]

To: Billy Tauzin [PhRMA lobbyist]

Billy—Sounds like you had very valuable conversations with [REDACTED]. They sound as though they both went quite well and that you established our key deal points that are, to some extent, as important as the total dollars. Thanks so much for doing that.

An ideal end game here would be a joint meeting to confirm any deal that we work out in a meeting with us and the principals ([White House Chief of Staff Rahm] Emanuel, [REDACTED]) early next week. Whether a deal fully sticks or not, we can’t be sure, but I for one would like to look the other side in the eye and shake their hand on whatever deal we work out. Jeff

From: Jeffrey Kindler

To: Billy Tauzin

Billy: As you know, yesterday’s discussion was premised on our understanding, as you informed the Board, that, given our willingness to work within the indicated range, the President would not, in fact, put Part D [the Medicare prescription drug plan] in play or otherwise offer new pharma pay-fors in tomorrow’s radio address. We need to confirm this inasmuch as it will completely undermine what we’re trying to do here if he, in fact, does say those kinds of things.

If this is not clear, I would strongly encourage you to engage personally on this with [REDACTED] and possibly others. Based on Bryant’s report yesterday, it does appear that [REDACTED] could, in fact, be helpful. Jeff

There’s lots more here.

These emails took a trade group’s efforts to expose, as the White House refused to cooperate with the House’s Energy and Commerce Committee attempts to review Obamacare’s development history.  The Wall Street Journal went on:

As a White House staffer put it in May 2009, “Rahm’s calling Nancy-Ann and knows Billy is going to talk to Nancy-Ann tonight. Rahm will make it clear that PhRMA needs a direct line of communication, separate and apart from any coalition.”  Nancy-Ann is Nancy-Ann DeParle, the White House health reform director, and Rahm is, of course, Rahm.

Final development of the bill was done behind the locked-doors of the back offices of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D, NV) Senate office suite, and the Senate vote itself occurred after the 2,000 page bill had been on the Congress’ Web site for public perusal for just 72 hours.  The bill itself was so secret that nearly all of the Congressmen voting were utterly ignorant of the bill’s contents.

And the House’s attempts to investigate the Obama DoJ’s Fast and Furious fiasco?  I’ve written about it here, here, and here (which post describes, briefly, other of Obama’s attempts to block transparency), among other posts.  This “openness” has culminated in Obama’s assertion of Executive Privilege to block responses to subpoenas for the information issued by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

The only thing transparent here is Obama’s dishonesty.