Tag Archives: spending

Huzzah

Posted on by
Reply

Regular order—it lives, sort of, at least on spending measures, in the House.

The House on Thursday voted to send 12 appropriations bills to the Senate. The chamber approved four of these 2018 spending measures prior to its August recess, and the remaining eight were debated and passed as part of the broader Thursday vote. They had previously passed out of committee. This is the first time since 2004 that a House Republican majority has passed all of its individual spending bills….

Now all we need is for the Senate to figure out how to do its job and pass these bills.  However, with unreliable Republicans in the Senate like John McCain (R, AZ), Rand Paul (R, KY), and Lisa Murkowski (R, AK), The Wall Street Journal is almost as skeptical about that as I am.

Nonsense

Posted on by
Reply

The National Park Service is handing $100,000 to UC Berkeley in a “research” grant to “to ‘honor the legacy’ of the Marxist revolutionary group the Black Panther Party.”  Worse, it did so without following its usual competitive bidding process for research grant money.

This cooperative research project between the National Park Service (NPS) and the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) on the Black Panther Party (BPP) is anchored in historical methods, visual culture, and the preservation of sites and voices.  The project will discover new links between the historical events concerning race that occurred in Richmond during World War II and the subsequent emergence of the BPP in the San Francisco Bay Area two decades later through research, oral history, and interpretation.

Committed to truthfully honoring the legacy of BPP activists and the San Francisco Bay Area communities they served, the project seeks to document the lives of activists and elders and the landscapes that shaped the movement[.]

This is…nonsense.  To truthfully handle the legacy of the Black Panther Party domestic terrorists, the Department of Justice should be the ones conducting this “research.”  If the NPS is serious about finding out things concerning the relationship between the Black Panthers and American society, it should claw back those $100,000 and transfer them to DoJ.

NPS’ funding announcement can be seen here.

Prioritize, Guys

Posted on by
Reply

President Donald Trump’s national infrastructure plan centers on glorified seed money directed to the localities looking to improve/build out their infrastructure.  The idea is that the locals know their needs best, those needs should be funded primarily locally or from within the nation’s private economic sector, and the building out will aggregate into a vastly improved national infrastructure—real bottom up development, with a little help from the Feds.

To that end, Trump is going to propose $200 billion in Federal spending be committed to a total $1 trillion infrastructure development collection of projects (OK, considerable help).

Right now the dynamic is: come, ask for a whole lot, bang on the table, have your economic studies showing the tens of thousands of jobs that will be created, have your regional study saying this will transform America, bang on the table some more, hire some lobbyists and you get money.  We’d rather have people come and say, “Listen, we’re chipping in this much, give us this little increment and we can make this thing happen.”

Naturally, the locals are getting their knickers twisted.  The ones with the biggest projects

say that local cost-sharing and private financing efforts would fall well short of making up for sharply reduced federal funding.

Nonsense.  You don’t get to freeload off Uncle Sugar, anymore.  Project leads in Chicago or Dallas don’t have a claim on the (tax) money of the good citizens of New York or California, and under the administration plan, they won’t be allowed to exercise their false claim to OPM.  New York and California will be able to keep their money for their own local projects.

This is an example of the deer in the headlights response of folks so used to the Government teat that they can’t conceive of better alternatives [emphasis added]:

Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Democratic New York Governor Andrew Cuomo have said they expect the federal government to cover half the cost of the Gateway project, which also includes bridges and track improvements.

“There’s no people or economic activity in that region that could possibly cover the cost of that?” said the administration official, when asked about a recent appeal by Mr Cuomo for federal aid for the project. “I think that’s a tough sell, would be my response.”

The suggestion that New York and New Jersey could pay their own way on the project…shocked some of the tunnel’s advocates.

Prioritize, guys.  On what are you spending your citizens’ money that you think is more important than your Gateway?  Say that out loud, so your citizens—your constituents, your bosses—can hear you.

Bank Bailout, Italian Style

Posted on by
1

Italy has nationalized Monte dei Paschi di Siena, a major bank that otherwise would have gone into bankruptcy. In the process, the bank’s €26.8 billion ($32.5 billion) “nonperforming loans” will be “disposed of,” and the Italian government taxpayers will feed the bank €5.4 billion and get a 70% stake in the failing bank.

Under the bad loan disposal plan, €26.1 billion will be bundled and sold at 21% of gross book value, the vast majority to the government-organized Atlante II fund, while the bank retains 5%.

This is the third time Monte dei Paschi had gotten capital injections, and for some reason, the men of the Italian government thinks this third time will be the charm.  Of course, that’s an easy choice for them to make; it’s not their money being used in this risk.  It’s the Italian taxpayers’ money being cavalierly gambled.

No, instead the bank’s creditors and other investors should be the only ones on the hook; they’re the ones whose money is at stake, and they’re the ones whose management oversight was…absent.

General Reform

Posted on by
Reply

25% of us don’t see doctors because that costs too much.

32% of older millennials (is there such a thing?  Gad) skip the doctor.  13% of Americans don’t have any health coverage plan at all—paying the penalty is more valuable to them.  Half of us don’t think we’ll have affordable health insurance much less Obamacare’s health coverage welfare.

This, together with today’s other post, just illustrates the fact that no single part of our economy—or of our Federal government—can effectively be treated in isolation: not Obamacare alone, not Federal spending alone (especially not by “cutting” through reducing the rate of growth in spending), not taxing alone, not debt handling alone.

They’re a system, and the system as a whole must be reformed, not convenient parts of it.  That’s Systems Management 101.