Monthly Archives: July 2012

DoJ and…Racism

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Speaking to the NAACP in Houston last Tuesday, Attorney General Eric Holder had this to say about Texas’ attempt to protect Americans’ voting rights by implementing a voter ID law that would help ensure that only eligible voters got to vote:

Many of those without IDs would have to travel great distances to get them—and some would struggle to pay for the documents they might need to obtain them.  We call those poll taxes.

The racism in Holder’s remarks is apparent.  As the WSJ pointed out

The Texas law stipulates that voters can use several kinds of ID to vote, including a driver’s license, passport, a US military ID, and (this being Texas) a handgun permit.  As for the “poll tax” canard, the law says the Texas Department of Public Safety will issue a free Election Identification Card if requested.

When was the last time Holder’s Jim Crow had a poll tax of $0.00?

But this is the new Jim Crow, Eric Holder style: anyone who votes Democratic (as opposed to democratic) should be allowed to vote, regardless of eligibility.  Never mind that the Supreme Court upheld a substantially identical voter ID law in Indiana just three years ago.  But Holder can’t attack Indiana; that state isn’t under his personal thumb, courtesy of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  Texas is.

This is also the same Attorney General that, shortly after he assumed the position, threw out a case of New Black Panther voter intimidation of white voters that the Federal government already had won—at the end of the previous administration—and concerning which it was, literally, all over but the sentencing.  That case eventually led to the resignation of career Federal Prosecutor J Christian Adams.  This case also led to then-active Federal Prosecutor Christopher Coates’ testimony in front of the US Civil Rights Commission about the new DoJ’s policy of not seeking enforcement of voter laws when the victims weren’t people of color or when the suspected perpetrators were.

It would be interesting to hear Holder give the same speech to a more balanced audience.

Motives Followup

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I wrote about motives a bit ago.  Here’s a followup on that.  From Fox News comes two items of interest.

First, the Department of Agriculture has been even more actively pushing its food stamps onto the non-needy than I had earlier written.  The Obama administration is trying harder and harder to pull Americans into government dependency, this time with a series of advertisements—paid for with your tax dollars—aimed at getting even those who don’t need food stamps to avail themselves of the “benefit.”  These advertisements are in the form of a 10-part miniseries called “Hope Park.”

The target of these vignettes is Diana, whose husband works (!) and who doesn’t think she needs the food stamps, as she notes in the 4th vignette:

I don’t need help from anyone.  My husband makes enough to take care of us.

By the last episode, though, Diana has been hooked, and she’s singing the praises of the stamps she didn’t need—but now needs badly.

As Senator Jeff Sessions (R, AL) describes this program,

It has become increasingly clear that, in recent years, the mission of the food stamp program has been converted from targeted assistance for those in need into an aggressive drive to expand enrollment regardless of need. … Read as a whole, USDA’s activities suggest that the program administrators take personal offense when people who technically qualify for their largesse decline to accept—and see it as an obstacle to overcome.

The other item of interest is this.

The Department of Health and Human Services has chosen to waive the work requirement that is part of the eligibility requirement for the Federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, and it carefully has done so without fanfare.  The directive through which HHS does this can be read here, and a copy can be read here.

Governor and Republican Presidential Candidate (presumably) Mitt Romney correctly noted

[T]he linkage of work and welfare is essential to prevent welfare from becoming a way of life.

But as Congressman Jim Jordan (R, OH) said,

President Obama just tore up a basic foundation of the welfare contract….

It’s true enough that the directive insists that

Waiver requests must include an evaluation plan.  …the preferred evaluation approach is a random assignment methodology, unless the Secretary determines that an alternative approach is more appropriate….

and

The Secretary will not approve a waiver for an initiative that appears substantially likely to reduce access to assistance or employment for needy families.

But notice carefully.  What constitutes adequate evaluation by the states is carefully left unspecified, except that if HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius decides she doesn’t like a state’s evaluation methodology, she’s free to substitute her own, whose criteria also are carefully left unspecified.  Moreover, “substantially unlikely” to reduce access also is left to the unspecified whims of the Secretary.

There’s more in that last phrase, too.  “[A]ppears substantially likely to reduce access to assistance or employment” clearly means that access to assistance is to be maintained independently of access to employment.  The directive doesn’t require access to assistance and employment.

Without a work requirement as an eligibility criterion for TANF assistance, though, there is only eligibility for TANF dependency.

Again, I ask: what are we to make of the motives of government officials who do these things while knowing full well the outcomes of their actions?

It Misses the Question

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Ben Wattenberg wrote about demographics as a cause of our “entitlement crisis” in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.

As he pointed out, birth rates are falling drastically in the nations wealthy enough to have an entitlement régime.  Contradictorily, that’s a normal result of the development of widespread wealth within nations.  For a variety of reasons—delayed marriage, increasing education, increasing incomes, more effective means of birth control, lower stigmatization of terminating pregnancies, and so on—birth rates in developed nations have fallen below the replacement rate needed simply to maintain their existing population levels (generally, 2.1 births per woman).   The birth rates in Italy, Spain, Greece, Eastern Europe, Russia, the former Soviet republics, and South Korea, for instance, are all below 1.5.  Japan’s rate is a potentially catastrophic 1.2.  The US rate, at about 2.0, still isn’t quite high enough to maintain our own population; although until the current economic failures, we could count on immigration to make up the shortfall.  Sort of.

All this adds up to not enough people are entering the labor force to pay for the existing entitlements.  When the US’ Social Security entitlement program was created 75 years ago, there were 7 people in the labor force for every retired person, and that retiree could count on living about 6 years in retirement.  Today, the number of people in the work force is  around 2-3 (and falling), and the retiree being supported can count on living around 35-40 years in retirement (that longer support duration is a demographic that Wattenberg doesn’t mention).

This certainly does emphasize the proximity of the crisis that’s upon us.

Wattenberg identified two current solutions to this: cutting the entitlements or running massive deficits.  He then offered what he thinks is a better solution.  Harking back to the ’60s and ’70s worries about the population bomb and the meme that we need to reduce our birth rates, he wants a similar program, this time preaching the opposite: our new parents need to have more children.

But Wattenberg misses the crisis’ cause.  It’s not that birth rates are too low, or that there aren’t enough new workers entering the system to support the entitlement economy.  That argument proceeds from a false premise.

The real answer, the individual liberty- and responsibility-preserving answer, is to eliminate the entitlements and privatize them, instead.  It’s as wrong for government to try to “influence” the family timing and size decisions of free men and women as it is for government to try to “influence” any other family-related decisions made by free men and women—or any other decision founded in individual conscience.

Another Idiotic Idea

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And another attempt to emulate the blatantly failing European model.  This one is backed by the AFL-CIO and the National Nurses United unions….

With that union backing, the Democrats (led by Congressman Peter Defazio (D, OR) in the House and Senator Tom Harkin (D, IA)), are pushing a bill that would impose a .03 cent tax on all financial trades.  Defazio says,

It would benefit long-term investors with stability

but

It’s “tiny,” and it would cost the “average investor” just $1 per year.  Let me see if I understand the logic of this.  It’s too small to matter to the little guy (and since it’s not a progressive tax, it’s even more trivial for the big players) but it’ll influence everyone to move toward trading market stability.

Then Defazio added this:

[I]t will still generate about $35 billion a year in income—income that could be used to rebuild the real economy, infrastructure, other investments.  Or money that could be used to help defray our deficit.

Yeah, sure.  We saw how much the last several Progressive stimulus spending packages did for our “infrastructure” and all those shovel ready jobs that President Obama yucked it up about not actually being shovel ready.  On top of which, when was the last time either party used tax money to reduce a budget deficit, rather than as seed money with which to leverage even more spending?

And this:  Bill Gates and George Soros are cited as backing this…idea…as a fine way to “painlessly” raise “a lot of money without affecting growth.”  There’s that false premise, again, this idea that the government needs more money.

Are the Democrats Serious about Raising Taxes on Americans…

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…or are they just posturing so they can continue their class warfare campaign, or otherwise for personal political gain?

First we get President Obama’s demand that the Congress pass his tax increase forthwith—you know the one: his extension of the Bush tax cuts only for some Americans while raising taxes on that group of Americans of whom he so thoroughly disapproves.

Then we get the Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell (R, KY), trying to take him up on his demand.

My recommendation is we give the president what he asked for.  He wants to have a vote on raising taxes on individuals making over $250,000….  That’s a vote we welcome.

But Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid (D, UT) won’t allow the vote.  Acting on the President’s demand is an “obstructionist stunt,” you see.  President Obama himself, through his press spokesman, Jay Carney, insists that the Republicans’ effort to give him what he demands is just “a gimmick.”

Of course, four Democrats in the Senate who are up for reelection this fall don’t want to be on the record as voting for a tax increase, and it would only take a three-Senator swing to change control of the Senate and cost Reid his power.  Additionally, these four—Bill Nelson (D, FL), Claire McCaskill (D, MO), Tim Kaine (D, VA), and Shelley Barkley (D, NV)—are from swing states whose coming down Republican could cost Obama his job, too.

Hmm….