Monthly Archives: June 2013

YouCut, Citizen Cosponser

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Recall the YouCut program that the House of Representatives Republican caucus instituted in the wake of the 2010 mid-term elections.

Now, building on the heels of that program’s success, the Republican caucus under the leadership of Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R, VA), whose leadership also led to the YouCut program, is instituting a new program that moves the House—and by extension the Federal government—closer to us citizens.  This program is CoSPonsor.gov, and it presents all legislation openly and clearly and allows each citizen to become a cosponsor of any piece of legislation—or not.

Here’s Cantor’s email that announces the plan [emphasis in the original]:

When we launched YouCut three years ago, we never imagined how engaged people would become and how successful the program would be in achieving its mission of changing the culture of spending into a culture of savings.
Millions cast votes across the country to encourage the House to cut spending, and that is exactly what we continue to do. Throughout the program, we’ve seen YouCut proposals drive public discussions, pass the House and even become signed into law. Now, as our new Majority continues to work to cut spending and grow our economy, it’s time to leverage the latest technology to expand YouCut into its next phase.
I am excited to announce the launch of CoSponsor.gov – a new platform that allows you to become a Citizen CoSponsor of any bill in the House.
Now, any engaged citizen can become a Citizen CoSponsor and track the status of the legislation they care about in the House.
Whether you want to cosponsor new legislation like the Kids First Research Act or become a Citizen CoSponsor of legislation that has already passed the House, like No Budget, No Pay, you can now do so here.
House Republicans believe that transparency, open government and engagement are vital to a modern Congress, and CoSponsor.gov is an important step in that direction.
Visit CoSponsor.gov today and become a Citizen CoSponsor of the bills you care about:
http://www.cosponsor.gov/
Regards,
Eric Cantor
Majority Leader
—————-
What issues do you care about? Visit CoSponsor.gov today to become a Citizen CoSponsor of any bill.

The link to CoSponsor.gov has been added to the right sidebar, near the top.

Too Big to Handle

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I’ve written before about the morality of government welfare as a first resort.  Here’s a practical reason for cutting back: it’s too big to manage effectively.  Here are some failures from that too big to handle:

A postal worker who ran marathons found her race times improved after she began drawing federal disability checks for an alleged back injury.

Another disabled federal employee went scuba diving, skied in Switzerland and did flips on a trapeze.  She spent part of her $193,000 in disability payments on a boat named “Free Ride” before she was caught.

A Justice Department lawyer collected $90,000 in annual disability checks after claiming the stress of his job kept him off the job.  Apparently the cable TV show he began hosting while drawing disability pay wasn’t so stressful.

And

15,000 recipients are 66 or older.  Six of them are over the age of 100—well past retirement age.

The Federal government compounds this by being disinterested in controlling the failures and the resulting waste of taxpayer wealth being redistributed.

funding for all agencies—about $3 billion per year—is automatically appropriated and run through the Department of Labor.

And

the federal [disability] program does not require employing agencies to order a second opinion. The claimant can pick his own doctor.

If his claim is rejected, he can file for a different disability, as often as he likes.

And

The Department of Labor, which administers FECA for 70 federal entities, doesn’t track fraud referrals and convictions[.]

The program is too large to be properly controlled, and it needs drastic paring back for economic and legal reasons as well as moral.

A Thought on Disparate Impact

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There is another disparate impact case wending its way to the Supreme Court; hopefully, this one actually will be argued, and the Court will come to a right decision.  The case is Township of Mount Holly v Mount Holly Gardens Citizens, and it concerns Mount Holly, NJ’s, plan to

redevelop a housing project afflicted with crime, overcrowding and property code violations.

Naturally, some of the affected renters sued, and importantly here, they’re claiming no intent to discriminate on the part of the township or the redevelopers.  They’re just saying that, because most of the folks impacted are minority, there must be racism in there somewhere.

No racism actually is present, so we’ll make some up.  Because the redevelopment will inconvenience us.

But that’s the purpose of disparate impact, generally.

Progressives and Taxes

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Look no further than California for the latest example of foolishness.

That state’s latest budget counts on at least $500 million from that state’s auction of carbon credits under its cap-and-trade…business…to balance its budget.

There’s a problem with that bait-and-switch…business…though.  As California’s Supreme Court ruled in its 1997 Sinclair Paint Co opinion, regulatory fees can’t

exceed in amount the reasonable cost of providing the protective services for which the fees are charged

or be imposed for

 unrelated revenue purposes.

The cap-and-trade collection, however, explicitly is a fee and not a tax—that’s how the fees were successfully assessed in the aftermath of California’s Proposition 13, which requires a supermajority in each house of the California legislature to raise taxes.

This leads to a couple of problems that would be no-brainer deal killers for anyone but a Progressive:

First, the stated purpose of the diversion: to put the monies into the state government’s general coffers in order to balance the budget, rather than to spend the money on “green” goals, which is the stated purpose of the cap-and-trade program.  The monies can’t be diverted to the general coffers.  Not legally, anyway.

Second, the diversion of the $500 million demonstrates that the state government believes the money is not needed so much for those “green” goals: the cap-and-trade fees “exceed in amount the reasonable cost of providing the protective services for which the fees are charged” by those $500 million.

Hmm….

A Tax YGTBSM

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Senator Orrin Hatch (R, UT), in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last Friday, had this tidbit while writing more generally about the IRS.

Look at the Earned Income Tax Credit.  Whether you like this refundable credit or not, the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration reported in April that improper payments account for 21% to 25% of total EITC payments in 2012.  Take the percentage of improper EITC payments and apply it to the approximate $1 trillion we’ll spend on ObamaCare premium credits in the decade beginning 2014.

And on funding for a program the IRS is supposed to administer, he added this:

already soaring budget for the [Obamacare] premium subsidies….

I’ve asked Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius to explain the massive jump in costs for premium subsidies.  The projected figure for subsidy expenditures has gone from nearly $16 billion in the president’s 2012 budget up to nearly $22 billion in his 2014 budget.

The IRS is not capable of handling its own business.  How is going to be able to handle any other business?