Tag Archives: politics

Not Entirely

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The Wall Street Journal‘s headline lays out the claim:

Elite Colleges Have a Looming Money Problem

The article goes on:

[T]here are financial problems below the surface that could emerge if the bull market stumbles and especially if some proposed Trump administration policies are enacted.

And this:

…Ivy League endowment returns, which could have been worth 20% more since the 2008 financial crisis if invested in a classic stock and bond mix.

We all could have done better. That’s irrelevant. The bare fact is these endowments, as the table of Ivy League endowments below shows, are plenty big enough, and they’re still growing, for all the temporary losses of the Panic of 2008.

*Per Wikipedia, a/o June 2023
**Calculated from undergrad + grad student enrollment

It’s all crocodile tears. If the schools were truly worried about their dwindling endowments—just $1 billion could fund 100 professorships or permanently cover tuition for 100 students—they could cut the claptrap and waste out of their expense structures. Those structures include such…foolishnesses…as bloated management teams that include a plethora of DEI staff and Inquisition bureaucracies designed to convict a male student on the basis of a female student’s bare accusation.

No, these schools have rich endowments; they’re not financially challenged. They just might lose their access to the Federal feedbag. Which they should anyway.

Congressional Term Limits?

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Sure, but only sort of.

Texas Republican Congresswoman Kay Granger has been absent from duty in Congress since last July. The discovery of that shirking (or coverup of disability) is leading to renewed calls for term limits for Congressmen. For instance,

Republican Utah Senator Mike Lee on Sunday…claimed Granger’s absence made a “compelling case” for term limits….

Yes and no. I remain adamantly opposed to Government dictating to us, in anything resembling absolute terms, who we might or might not choose to represent us in that government. I am just as adamantly opposed to one generation of Americans attempting to dictate to future generations of Americans who they might or might not choose to represent them in government.

Rather than hard and absolute limits, Article V of our erstwhile Articles of Convention has the optimal application of term limits.

…no person shall be capable of being a delegate [to Congress] for more than three years in any term of six years….

That Congress was a unicameral body, but that relative limit is easily adaptable to our bicameral Congress. It would be easy enough, too (as easily as enacting any Constitutional Amendment…), to add the requirement that no Congressman, during a period of non-Congressional service, can serve on any government staff, whether for pay or pro bono, nor can such a one work for or with any government lobbyist during that period.

Separate from that, and additional to it, former Department of Education Press Secretary Angela Morabito:

WOW: Rep. Kay Granger (R-TX), who hasn’t voted on a bill in six months, has been living in a nursing home in secret. Records show she has a staff of 25. If any of them knew—and it would be hard not to know—they are complicit[.]

Granger’s, or her staffers’, concealment of her incapacity and absence from Congress should suffer serious consequences from their deception. Those consequences should begin with Granger forfeiting her Congressional pension, if she was/is of sound mind during this period, and should include every single one of her staffers forfeiting any pension they might have accrued along with the barring of all them, including unpaid staffers in DC or in her district, from Federal and Texas government service for life.

That group openly and dishonorably and in a most unamerican fashion deprived Granger’s constituents of their Congressional representation for a quarter of the just concluding Congressional session.

Namby-Pamby

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It seems that Yemen is turning out hard to deter from its attacks on Israel. It shouldn’t be surprising that it seems so, given the Progressive-Democrat Biden administration’s lack of effort seriously to deter the Houthis in Yemen even from attacking commercial shipping in the nearby waters of the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea.

Despite hundreds of American and allied strikes and the deployment of a US Navy flotilla to the Red Sea, Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels have kept up a steady drumbeat of attacks on commercial shipping passing through the vital waterway and lobbing missiles at Israel.

Those hundreds of strikes have never been a serious attempt to deter the terrorists. They’ve just been reactive pin-pricks and tit-for-tat hits against the launch site(s) responsible for particular shots taken at shipping or, lately, at Israel. Virtue-signaling doesn’t deter much of anything.

It’s certainly true that terrorists who view martyrdom as a thing to be sought will be harder to deter than many other entities. However, were serious efforts made—were the Biden administration with or without the meekly passive participation of European governments—to destroy all of the terrorists’ launch sites, weapons and missile caches, the terrorists resident in them or nearby, in parallel with cutting off their resupply by sinking Iranian shipping carrying the resupply, deterrence qua deterrence would be irrelevant. The Houthis can’t shoot what they don’t have.

This, too:

The Houthis have withstood a nearly decadelong campaign by Saudi Arabia aimed at unseating them.

In this regard, the Houthis have been actively aided and abetted by the Progressive-Democrat Biden administration, beginning with their cutoff of arms sales to Saudi Arabia over the latter’s attacks on Houthi installations and Houthis themselves. The Biden claque masqueraded that cutoff as recompense for a Saudi’s murder of a journalist. That they’d be aiding terrorists hasn’t mattered to them. Virtue-signaling again.

“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.

Food Stamps and Consumer Choice

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A Wall Street Journal article on soda companies and their lobbying efforts to keep their drinks eligible for the Federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and related programs closed with this bit:

The Republican Party has long been divided over policing what people on food stamps eat. Some GOP lawmakers favor consumer choice.

For instance, Congressman Frank Lucas (R, OK), of the House Agriculture Committee:

I believe in educating consumers on what is in their best interest. I’ve always had a hard time telling people what they cannot have.

I agree with Lucas regarding Government dictating to consumers what they can—or must—buy and what they cannot or must not buy. However, Lucas and his ilk need to better understand who the consumer is in the present case.

The consumer in the milieu of welfare programs like SNAP is not the welfare recipient. That person merely is picking out welfare package handouts. The consumer, the one who’s actually doing the buying, or not, of those package contents, is us taxpayers. We’re the ones paying for—buying—the food stamp products, in the particular case, with our tax remittals. That food stamp recipients can pick and choose among the variety of food packages we purchase for them in no way alters this fundamental fact.

It’s absolutely the case that we should be the ones deciding what we buy with our tax money, what we buy for inclusion in those package varieties, not the recipients of our welfare packages.