Tag Archives: politics

“Who Needs 1,000 Social Security Offices?”

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Schools in Contempt of Court

Posted on by
Reply

Despite a variety of court rulings, including from the Supreme Court, far too many still schools are using race and gender in their admission standards and for other performance criteria metrics.

The Equal Protection Project, founded and led by Cornell professor William Jacobson, has released a deep-dive report on the prevalence of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training at Ivy League universities.
In his comprehensive report, Poison Ivies: DEI and the Downfall of the Ivy League, Jacobson examines programs the eight Ivy League institutions use and require for students.

Jacobson:

The review of Ivy League practices by our CriticalRace.org project reflects substantial efforts by Ivy League schools to purport to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action, while maintaining work-arounds and DEI practices that continue the obsession with racial identities

One set of TL;DR findings, focused on our oh-so-cool Ivy League schools, as summarized by Fox News:

  • Four require DEI training in student orientation programs (Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale)
  • Six require faculty or staff DEI training in some capacity (Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Penn, Princeton, and Yale)
  • All eight have DEI offices at the institutional and/or department level
  • Five have a strategic plan devoted to DEI or anti-racism (Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Yale)
  • All eight have DEI or CRT (critical race theory) topics in classes and curricula
  • All eight have bias reporting systems

For those schools—not just the Ivy Leaguers; the report highlights 26 schools—so evidently contemptuous of court rulings, the Federal government should cut off all Federal funds to those schools and reduce funds transfers to the States in the amount of their own continued funding for those schools until the schools cure their functional contempt of court status by complying with the rulings rather than weasel-wording their way around them.

Pick One

Posted on by
Reply

A letter writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section wrote that FBI Director Christopher Wray is a good man, but that he was wrong for the job he had as Director.

Stipulated, arguendo, the first part.

Then, though, he closed with this:

Mr Wray should have been the insider who reformed the FBI and restored it to its former place of respect. Having missed that chance, the bureau may now be treated as another institution in need of disruption and a significant reset. This may or may not work out well for our nation’s premier law-enforcement agency.

An agency that is an institution in need of disruption and a significant reset due to its senior leadership’s involvement in interfering with the election of a politician of whom they personally disdained, as the letter-writer noted, cannot possibly be a premier law-enforcement agency.

On the contrary, the FBI is an agency badly wanting a thorough and widespread purge of upper and senior management or an outright disbandment and replacement with an entirely new agency completely devoid of the FBI’s existing upper and senior management personnel.

More Progressive-Democrat Lies

Posted on by
Reply

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.