Tag Archives: regulation

A Foolish Question

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors note that California’s Progressive-Democratic governor Gavin Newsom has waived some permitting requirements for some folks to facilitate their rebuilding efforts in the wake of the fires burning to ashes some suburbs of Los Angeles. Then they ask

Why not ease regulations for all projects if the rules are such a barrier to development?

It’s clear enough why not. Newsom hasn’t had the epiphany the editors’ headline at the link claims; he’s pandering to the uber-rich and to the upper middle class folks in what is really a narrow slice of the whole of California. Those rich who’ve lost their homes to the fires are major donors to him and to Party. The waiver is limited to these panderees because throughout that whole of the rest of California, Green groups and unions operate, and they’re major donors, also, to Newsom and to Party.

End Congressional Oversight of the District of Columbia?

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Washington, DC, delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) wants an end to Congressional oversight of the District of Columbia, and she’s moving to revive earlier legislation that would to do so.

The congressional review period for DC bills is onerous for the District, and rarely even used by Congress, causing DC bills to be unnecessarily ensnared in congressional bureaucracy for months[.]

It’s already the case, though, that the oversight is so rarely used—only twice in the last 30 years has Congress moved to overrule a DC-passed ordinance—that the district already is, functionally, self-ruling.

However.

The move, even were it a good idea, would require an Amendment to our Constitution. Here’s Art I, Sect 8 on governance of the District of Columbia:

To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings

Holmes has a beef, in that there are too many bureaucrats involved, and it is much to slow to get anything done. Those 60 days to review an ordinance proposal are patently excessive, especially in this day of computers and Congressional staffs so bloated that staffers are scratching for things to do. I’ll go out on a limb: it shouldn’t take more than a week (Sundays excepted) to do the review and either approve or reject the ordinance.

Those interferences, those delays, badly want reduction.

One More Reason…

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…to stop doing business in New York. This time, it’s the State’s move to tax energy producers who sell their fossil fuel products in the State on the risible basis of those producers’ (global) CO2 production over the years 2000 through 2018. Never mind that, as the Wall Street Journal‘s editors put it,

It’s impossible to determine a company’s contribution to climate change since the effects of CO2 emissions on temperature and natural disasters are mediated by myriad variables.

New York’s bureaucrats will make their assessments anyway, and those assessments will be, of necessity, wholly arbitrary. Then there’s this, too, which New York’s government personages consider irrelevant:

Most fossil-fuel emissions stem from their combustion rather than production….

The fossil fuel energy producers shouldn’t waste time litigating this in court, even though they’d likely win given the plethora of court decisions that hold moves like New York’s illegal.

These folks should simply stop selling their products in New York, and that should include no longer selling their products to utilities that provide electricity- and natural gas-related energy in New York. They’ll save more money that way, money that could be used for innovation and better fossil-fuel-related products for their other customers.

Nor will New Yorkers be harmed by the withdrawal. They have plenty of energy flowing from all those “green” and “renewable” energy sources. And those nuclear reactors on the horizon. The State government’s personages assure us so.

“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.

More Progressive-Democrat Lies

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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.