Monthly Archives: March 2013

Obama and the Iranians

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If you have to deny that you’re bluffing, it’s pretty clear that you are bluffing.  Yet Vice President Joe Biden ran exactly that line in front of last week’s AIPAC conference.  America’s policy, he said,

is to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, period.  President Barack Obama is not bluffing.  He is not bluffing.

The next day, General James Mattis, Commander US Central Command, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, which included this exchange:

Senator James Inhofe (R, OK):  Are the current diplomatic and economic efforts to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapons capability, are they working?
General Mattis: No sir…[Tehran’s] nuclear industry continues.

Indeed, the sanctions may well be hurting the Iranian people.  However, the Iranian government cares more about getting nuclear weapons than it does about the welfare of its people.  Since the sanctions aren’t hurting the government, they cannot work.

Informed by this mindset, the Iranian government is quite satisfied that the US is bluffing.  They’ve seen in all these years (not limited to the Obama years) no evidence that the US is serious on the matter of a nuclear armed Iran, no evidence that we will ever become serious, no evidence that we will go beyond sanctions to real moves to stop them.

Regulatory Reform

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The eyes of Texas are upon us….

Competitive Enterprise Institute‘s OpenMarket.org describes regulatory reform, Texas style.  In 1977, Texas enacted legislation that automatically kills state-level agencies after a named duration unless a subsequent legislature explicitly votes to extend that agency.  More, the question of extension isn’t even permitted to come up for a vote unless a Sunset Advisory Commission favorably recommends it first.

OpenMarket notes the results:

Through this process, the commission [10 legislators and 2 members of the public] has abolished 78 state agencies and saved $945.4 million in a 29-year period [through 2006].  Since the Sunset Commission’s expenditures over this time period were just $32.8 million, every dollar spent on this program has yielded about $29 in return.

We don’t have a bloated government here.  And surviving agencies exist because they actually do their jobs, and so they’re capable of justifying their existence to the commission—and to the Texas citizenry through those two public members.

Maybe the Federal government needs a similar Act—not addressing only the agencies, but the Cabinet Departments, as well.

Texas’ law can be read here.

Progressive Policies and the Middle and Poorer Classes

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I’m picking on California here, but only for concreteness’ sake—there’s nothing unique about California’s Progressivism.

  • [California’s] zoning laws, which liberals favor to control “suburban sprawl,” have constrained California’s housing supply and ratcheted up prices.  …land restrictions became common in high-income enclaves during the 1970s—coinciding with the burgeoning of California’s real-estate bubble—and have increased income-based segregation and inequality.
  • California’s staggering labor and energy costs—it has the nation’s most stringent fuel and renewable standards—have helped kill hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs in California’s interior.  Note: Those are jobs that traditionally served as entry points to the middle class. The Golden State has shed a third of its manufacturing base over the past decade.
  • California’s non-manufacturing businesses are also moving or expanding operations where labor, land, energy, and capital are cheaper.  Comcast announced in the fall that it is moving 1,000 call-center jobs out of California because of the “high cost of doing business.”  Facebook, eBay, and LegalZoom have opened up Texas offices in the past few years, while PayPal, Yelp, and Maxwell Technologies have pushed into Phoenix.
  • California’s small businesses that can’t leave…so easily have been slow to invest because they are financially squeezed.  Rents are prohibitive, and Sacramento takes 9.3% of every dollar over $49,000—and 13.3% over $1 million—that an individual or small business owner earns.

There’s more.

Suppose that the Fed raises interest rates to 5% over the next few years.  This is a reversion to normal, not a big tightening.  Yet with $18 trillion of debt outstanding, the federal government will have to pay $900 billion more in annual interest.

That’s money that could have been committed to actually paying down the debt Progressives have saddled our middle and poorer class grandchildren with: of those $18 trillion, nearly a third was added in the last four+ years.  That’s money that could have been committed to lower tax rates so our middle and poorer class families could keep more of what they earned for their own purposes.  That’s money that could have been committed to transitioning our Social Security and Medicare programs to defined contribution plans rather than defined benefit ones, so that our middle and poorer class families could have more control over their own families’ future and their own families’ retirement and health expenses.

But wait—there’s still more: consider our Social Security and Medicare programs.  They’re going broke—Social Security will be forced to reduce benefit payouts to 75% of current levels by 2035 because the Social Security Trust Fund will run out of money by then, and payouts will come entirely from then-current payroll taxes.  Or the government will borrow more (and so raise future taxes) to cover the difference.  Or it will raise taxes currently to cover that difference.  Either way, those taxes are money taken away from the middle and poorer classes, thereby preventing them from seeing to their own goals and needs as fully as they could.  And those future taxes, to cover present borrowing, will rob our children and grandchildren similarly.

Medicare’s Hospital Trust Fund will run dry by 2024, reducing hospital payments to 87% of their current level since these will be entirely dependent on current payroll taxes.  Unless the government borrows or raises taxes, with the same deleterious impact on our middle and poorer classes as with Social Security.

Progressives, though, won’t allow any reform for these programs, other than raising taxes on an already overtaxed American citizenry.

More Racism

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The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the New York City Districting Commission has resubmitted its redistricting plan for the 51 New York council districts following the 2010 census.

According to a news release, the plan creates 35 so-called minority districts in which “protected racial and language-minority groups” represent an overall majority of the total population of these districts.  By comparison, the 2003 districting plan had 30 such districts.

This is blatantly racist.  The Constitution—and the New York State constitution is no different in this regard—specifies one man, one vote.  From the 14th Amendment of the Federal Constitution:

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State….

From Article II, Section 1, of the New York State constitution:

Every citizen shall be entitled to vote at every election for all officers elected by the people and upon all questions submitted to the vote of the people provided that such citizen is eighteen years of age or over and shall have been a resident of this state, and of the county, city, or village for thirty days next preceding an election.

There’s nothing in here that differentiates one American, or one New Yorker, from another.  We’re all Americans; in the present case we’re all New Yorkers.  Neither constitution admits of giving special voting privileges to some Americans over others, neither constitution contemplates the racism of “protected racial” or “protected language-minority”…groups.

Both constitutions—quite properly—insist that a man’s ability to vote is based not on the color of his skin or the thickness of his accent but on the status of his citizenship.

It’s time to stop racist gerrymandering.  All of us look alike in the eyes of God, before the law, and in our right to vote.

Good Idea, Bad Law

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It’s useful for a jurisdiction to control property use through zoning laws—whether to keep unsavory but legal businesses away from children, to preserve an historical building/neighborhood, and so on—provided those restrictions don’t get too onerous or too intrusive on the property rights of the owner(s).

Sometimes, though, a well-intended law has unintended consequences.

In a precedential decision, Motley v. Borough of Seaside Park, No. A-3214-11, the Appellate Division [of New Jersey] found a house that had been gutted to a shell to accomplish repairs was totally destroyed and so lost its status as a grandfathered nonconforming use under local zoning laws.  The panel strictly construed a statute that says a nonconforming use or structure may be restored or repaired if partially destroyed but total destruction terminates it.

Contaminating this seeming miscarriage of justice, though [emphasis added],

In August 2009, [property owner Daniel] Motley requested and obtained a permit to repair and renovate the house and replace the air-conditioning unit.  The permit carried a notation that siding, shingles and windows could be added, but no bumpouts were allowed and the structure could not be expanded.

Once work began, however, the building, not lived in for some time, was found to be in worse shape than expected and uninhabitable.  Among other problems, the roof and water system leaked, part of the first floor ceiling had collapsed, floor beams were rotted and the main center beam was sagging.

This has implications for homeowners attempting to repair/rebuild their homes and businesses in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy: the storm’s destruction of buildings will cancel any variances granted, even though these buildings will have been continuously occupied and the spirit of the variances honored throughout.

New Jersey’s Appellate Division ruling on essentially destroyed property thus seems counterproductive; however, the court made the correct ruling: being unable to strike the law as unconstitutional, it applied the law as written.  The failure is in the law itself, not in the ruling.

Now it’s on the New Jersey legislature to correct this evident injustice.