Tag Archives: policy

Sanctions and Foreign Governments

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The new Congress is pushing toward legislation that would increase sanctions on Iran should the current “negotiations” over Iran’s nuclear weapons program fail. President Barack Obama has promised to veto the legislation, insisting he’s got everything under control.

Then, on Friday last, British Prime Minister David Cameron said in a press conference held jointly with Obama that he’d been lobbying US Senators against that same legislation and that he intended to continue to do so. In the next sentence he lied about it being lobbying, insisting in wide-eyed innocence

That wouldn’t be right[.]

Now we have two reasons to pass the sanctions legislation, and to repass it over Obama’s veto, either of which is sufficient by itself. Aside from Obama’s foreign policy and negotiating fecklessness, no foreign government has any business trying to influence our Congress. None at all.

Get to work, Congressmen.

A Thought on $3.7 Billion

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President Barack Obama thinks it’ll take $3.7 billion to handle the explosive flood of unaccompanied children pouring over our border as a result of his decision not to enforce our existing immigration laws. Obama wants the money to plus up existing border security, illegal alien housing in the border area and elsewhere, dealing with the health problems these children are unavoidably bringing with them, transportation, handling legal matters, and so on.

Assuming the money should be spent (a position I don’t endorse, but stay with me), I have a thought on how the money should be allocated. I’d pass a $3.7 billion appropriation that allocates the money in this way:

  • $3.5 billion as block grants to go directly to Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, the border states most affected, for use in plussing up existing border security, illegal alien housing in the border area, dealing with the health problems these children are unavoidably bringing with them, and so on. Notice that this money does not through Federal hands; it completely bypasses the Feds and goes directly to the states.
  • $0.2 billion allocated 80:20 between the states (the 80) and the Federal government for the express purpose of handling transportation back to the children’s home country. This is a generous sum of money, and it gives the states the wherewithal to transport the children, if the Feds are too reluctant to do so.

Notice that there’s not a dime for “handling legal matters.” There aren’t any; existing law makes clear that these children are eligible for immediate transport to their country of origin. To those who cry these children are running from gangs and violence: there has been no surge in any of that in the last few months; the gangs and violence have been extant for years. That doesn’t mean we should ignore the children’s plight today; it does mean claimed urgency is wholly a cynical political ploy by the Left.

These children and others like them should, indeed, get the benefit of American help and largesse—as part of a proper reform of our immigration system.

IRS’ Computers

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During Monday night’s House Oversight Committee hearing, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen tried to deflect blame for the missing Lerner Emails by claiming that the IRS’ computer systems were outdated, obsolete, prone to PC hard drive crashes, and it’s all due to lack of funding:

It is not unusual for computers anywhere to fail, especially at the IRS in light of the aged equipment IRS employees often have to use in light of the continual cuts in its budget these past four years. Since January 1 of this year, for example, over 2,000 employees have suffered hard drive crashes.

The IRS has, despite all those enormous budget cuts, a $1.8 billion IT budget. Regarding those obsolete systems, The New York Times had some thoughts:

After five years, a project to replace the Internal Revenue Service’s aging file-keeping computer system with modern technology is so far behind schedule that the IRS has told the prime contractor that unless it improves its performance by the end of the month [31 December 2003], the government may have no choice but to fire it.

The project, which was expected to cost $8 billion when completed, has spent less than $1 billion so far, but it is already 40% over budget for what it has done, according to the IRS Oversight Board, an independent watchdog body that Congress created in 1998.

And this:

”This is not about a one-time delay,” said Larry Levitan, chairman of the Oversight Board. ”Every single major project under way experienced a significant delay in time and overrun in budget—not two or three out of five, but five out of five. What we have here is a five-year track record of absolute consistency of cost overruns and delayed deliveries.”

In fact, some parts of the computer system upgrade project had fallen 27 months behind schedule in those five years.

There’s this update from Bloomberg:

The upgrade, which will allow the IRS to process the returns on a daily instead of a weekly cycle during the 2012 filing season, is part of a business systems modernization program, begun 12 years ago, that also includes overhauls of the agency’s electronic tax filing and data retrieval systems.

To get even this far, the IRS had to dumb down the project and not include, as originally planned and scheduled, retirement plan and business tax records in the database upgrade part of their project.

Of course, Turn-around Artist and part-time IRS Commissioner John Koskinen knows this history, but that’s a small point here. The larger point is that the IRS has had lots of time and lots of money with which to upgrade its systems—including the PCs its personnel have on their desk, PCs (and OEM hard drives) that cost jingle money compared to their systems upgrade project. In fact, were I to buy an adequate PC from Dell (adequate: no knock on Dell, meaning satisfactory for the job) for each of the 89,500 IRS employees, it would cost me just $125 million out of that $1.8 billion budget, or about 7% of the budget—and this would be expense that wouldn’t need to be repeated for four or five years.

Koskinen’s attempt to blame his “lost” emails on poor Congressional budget decisions is just another example of his, and the IRS’, general mendacity.

Aside: how well were the data on those 2,000 hard drives backed up?

Another Failed Government Farm Policy

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The US government is being forced to support sugar companies even though taxpayers are already footing a $280 million bill stemming from loans the companies can’t repay.

The loans are all part of the Feds’ farm policy of propping up sugar prices.  So 300 million American sugar consumers can pay artificially high prices to benefit a few sugar farmers.

All told, Alexandra Wexler wrote in her Wall Street Journal article at the above link,

processors defaulted on $171.5 million in 2013, even after the USDA spent $106.7 million buying sugar to boost prices.

Wexler quite properly decries the matter, but she lays it off to a government problem.  No.  This failure, and these bankruptcies, in fact aren’t costing the US government anything, and the US government isn’t at all being “forced to support sugar companies.”  This failure is costing American citizens—us taxpayers—those of us who fund the government—all this money.  This failure is a part of we American citizens’ being “forced to support sugar companies.”

The Mendacity of Zero-Tolerance Policies

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Here’s another example.  A 17-year-old high school student (and volleyball player) in the North Andover Public Schools system, Erin Cox, was texted by a friend at a (underage) drinking party who needed a ride home.  Notwithstanding the judgment that brought the friend to such a gathering, this young lady retained the good sense to ask for help, recognizing that she was too drunk to drive herself.  Cox answered the call.

Shortly after she arrived to pick up her friend and bring her home, though, the police also arrived and made a number of arrests—not including Cox.  The police involved absolved her of any wrong-doing, recognizing she was there to help a friend and not a party participant.

That wasn’t good enough for Superintendent Dr Kevin Hutchinson, though.  He has a “No tolerance policy for drugs and alcohol.”  He suspended Cox for five games for her involvement in the party.  “No tolerance” apparently includes no tolerance for helping drunken friend who retained the judgment to call for help rather than trying to drive herself—since giving that help necessarily involved the alcohol that help-requesting friend had ingested.

Cox spoke a few days later to The Boston Herald.

I wasn’t drinking.  And I felt like going to get her was the right thing to do.  Saving her from getting in the car when she was intoxicated and hurt herself or getting in the car with someone else who was drinking. I’d give her a ride home.
…
I just feel very defeated.  When you’re in high school you’re supposed to stay perfect and be perfect, but everyone makes mistakes.

No.  This young woman made no mistake.  Her school’s “leadership” did.