Daily Archives: 14 March 2013

Obama’s Other Face

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President Barack Obama is giving the appearance of wanting a bipartisan, compromise deal on our budget, deficit, and debt.  Is this real, this time, or just another version of the idle chit-chat and outright lies he’s passed off for the last five years?

The Wall Street Journal offers some metrics for assessing his behavior this time around.

  • Will he drop his demand for a tax increase outside of tax reform?  This has no chance of passing, and his continued insistence will poison the chance of any budget deal.  On tax reform he has willing GOP partners in Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp and Ohio Senator Rob Portman, but the formula has to be lower rates in exchange for fewer loopholes.  Any additional revenue will have to come from the faster economic growth that will follow.
  • Will he agree to a flexible, generous guest-worker program on immigration?  The AFL-CIO wants a restrictive program with a political body determining when there is a labor shortage and how many visas can be granted in specific industries.  Anything close to the AFL-CIO plan won’t stop the flow of illegal immigrants coming to the US for work, but it ought to kill reform in Congress.
  • Will he put more than token entitlement reforms on the table?  As we wrote last week (“Obama’s Not So Grand Offer,” March 8), the President’s Medicare proposals don’t begin to solve the health-care spending problem.  Short of Paul Ryan’s premium-support plan, the only chance for reform worth the name is “comprehensive cost-sharing” that forces individuals to confront at least some of the costs of their own care.

These sound like a pretty good test to me.  It looks, from the Senate Democrats’ budget proposal, like he’s failed the test.

More Regulation Foolishness

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This one isn’t as egregious as the idiocy described at Coyote Blog‘s place, but it’s bad enough.

Think about the expanse of…something…between the sidewalk in front of your house and the curb of the street.  Some towns have the sidewalk and the curb immediately adjacent to each other, but in most urban areas, this is a three- to five-foot wide strip in which most folks plant grass as an extension of their yard.  Ron Finley, though, plants a garden in his strip (parkway, as it’s known in Los Angeles) in LA, and he advises others on how to do the same.

Except that there are LA regulations against just up and doing that.

City code forbids residents without special permits to plant much of anything besides grass in curbside areas, making many of the gardens illegal.

After receiving citations from the city, Mr Finley persuaded officials to waive the $400 permit fee he was supposed to pay to install drought-resistant, aesthetically pleasing plants up to 36 inches tall outside his own home.  But he is still trying to get the city to approve a greater variety of plants for these spaces.

Never mind that such gardens are highly patriotic,

Urban farming isn’t new, dating back at least to World War I, when the government encouraged Americans to become more self-sufficient by planting “liberty gardens[,]”

they’re against the rules.

In fairness to LA, though, there is an effort to get a little bit more sensible here.

A spokesman for the district’s city councilman, Herb Wesson, said city staffers are working on revising current policy to let residents make more use of the parkways [those strips] “where appropriate.”

It remains to be seen, though, what the city’s definitions of “where,” “appropriate,” and “more use” will turn out to be, as well as the rationale for same.