Tag Archives: government

Hasn’t Our Economy Been Managed Disastrously Enough?

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Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D, OH) considers that the oil and gas businessmen are greedy b*stards, and they cannot be trusted.  He wants to put their business’ profits under government control—and not just any part of government; he wants to cut the Congress out of the picture and set up another Board for President Obama.  He’s joined by five more Democrats.

The Democrats, worried about higher gas prices, want to set up a board that would apply a “windfall profit tax” as high as 100 percent on the sale of oil and gas, according to their legislation. The bill provides no specific guidance for how the board would determine what constitutes a reasonable profit.

This “Reasonable Profits Board” is intended to control gas profits in the industry.

Further, in an amazing display of economic ignorance, the bill Kucinich proposes actually requires, in all seriousness, that it’s the oil and gas companies who must pay the tax.  They really don’t believe that the cost increase would be passed on to the customers.  They really don’t understand that the tax, and the cost bump to the end user, would simply depress the business’ ability to fund their own operations, expand hiring, search for more oil and gas supplies, conduct R&D, and so on; and it would similarly reduce consumers’ ability to put food on their tables and pay their rents.

But it’s all for a good cause.  Kucinich earmarks the taxes for funding alternative transportation programs when oil-and-gas prices spike.  This is just ridiculous on its face.  If those “alternative transportation programs” were any good, they wouldn’t need government subsidies—your tax monies—to compete in the market.  Just look at how the Obama High Speed Rail boondoggle, including the California bullet train, for instance, have turned out.  See who’s left holding the bag for that “alternative transportation program” stuff and nonsense.

I’m a bit confused by another aspect of this proposal, though.  It’s a lot of trouble to get such legislation passed these days, especially with unruly Republicans running amok in the House.  It would be a lot easier just to have the EPA issue a rule.

The other Democrats who are pushing this invasion of the free market are these

  • John Conyers, Jr. (D, MI)
  • Bob Filner (D, CA)
  • Marcia Fudge (D, OH)
  • Jim Langevin (D, RI)
  • Lynn Woolsey (D, CA):

All six need to be replaced at the 2012 election, if not in the Democratic Party primaries leading into the election.

On Shrinking Government

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This should be, in principle, an Obama move that we can support.  Of course, the devil will be in the details, and this “shrinkage” is pretty trivial—only a reduction of 2,000, or so, civil servants out of a total Federal work force of nearly 4.5 million, and a cost reduction of walking around money—$3 billion over 10 years.  But it’s a start, and if we wait until the last step has been mapped out to a gnat’s patootie, the journey will never start.

What the President wants to do in the present case is consolidate some unnamed Commerce “core business functions” with the Small Business Administration, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the Export-Import Bank, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and the Trade and Development Agency.

His idea has been under consideration for some time, but one objection to it is one that this poor, dumb Texas boy doesn’t understand.  Those earlier thoughts had also included moving the NOAA from Commerce to Interior, but there was “resistance internally to moving it to the Interior Department.”  The boss said to move, so off they go.  Where’s the problem?

Maybe, while we’re at it, we could also eliminate the EPA and the President’s Office of Legal Counsel.  Oh, wait….

The mechanics proposed are interesting, too, and are the real reason for my initial support (subject to satisfaction with the details, as always).  With this initial consolidation permission, the bill if passed, would let the President propose other reorganizations of his Executive Branch and require the Congress to give it an un-amended, up or down vote within 90 days.  Thus, the President gets more flexibility over the structure of his Branch, and the Congress retains its present power over the structure of the Federal government, including the Executive Branch.

However, the ability for either party to stall and to posture for political gain would become much more difficult.  And the members of Congress would have to be on the public record, in front of their constituents, for their individual decisions on the reorgs.  Moreover, amendments remain eminently possible: the pre-proposal dickerings that should be occurring anyway would get objections worked out, and the necessary modifications to satisfy the reasons for a down vote would constitute such amendments as well.

This wants a close look, devoid of political imperatives on both sides.