Monthly Archives: January 2017

What’s Being Covered Up?

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If anything?  President-Elect Donald Trump’s transition team has Democrats’ panties in a wedgy because Trump’s men are going directly to Cabinets and independent Agencies and asking about programs and who’s running them.  How rude.

Critics of President-elect Trump have suggested the inquiries are a sign his administration intends to gut key programs and punish the staffers involved.

Sounds like a collection of guilty consciences to me.

The inquiries began earlier this month when transition team members submitted 74 questions to the Energy Department regarding climate change and other policy issues, including two about staffers who worked on President Obama’s climate agenda.

Oh, my.  That’s just not done.  Tsk.

Congressmen Elijah Cumming (D, MD) and Frank Pallone (D, NJ) ranking Democrats, respectively, of the House Oversight and Energy committees expressed concern about Trump transition team questions directed to the EPA:

We are concerned that these efforts to single out particular department employees involved in efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions may be an attempt to target DOE employees whose scientific views on climate change differ from those of the incoming Trump administration.

Americans are concerned that you Democrats are trying to keep the names of bureaucrats in the EPA hidden from incoming administration leadership whose scientific views on climate change differ from those EPA bureaucrats.

If it’s all innocent, the doings in those Obama administration facilities, why are Democrats so desperate to keep things under wraps until the new administration is in place?  Why do they object to a new administration coming in already knowing what’s what before they assume office rather than being forced to learn de novo?  Not even Obama’s transition guys—or those wonderful folks in the House—can be so precious as to think an ordinary transition scheme informs the newbies of all there is to know.

The Regulation Administration

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…is in its last days, but it keeps on trying to keep in our business.  In an article for an upcoming issue of New York University Journal of Legislation & Public Policy, Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew

made a closing argument Wednesday in defense of the financial regulatory overhaul the Obama administration engineered during the past eight years.

Among his arguments:

Mr Lew makes the case that those new entities [e.g., the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Financial Stability Oversight Council] allow the government to react to new forms of consumer abuse or financial engineering.

That’s part of the problem, though. It’s these new entities that define “new forms of consumer abuse” without regard to statutory definitions passed by our elected representatives.  It’s these new entities that define new forms of financial engineering as unacceptable or not, without consideration of whether the new forms actually are good ideas.

Progressives like Lew actually think such government overreaches are features and not failures.

A regulatory regime that becomes frozen in time will by its very definition be outpaced by those that seek to arbitrage it….

Lew is carefully ignoring the fact that a regulatory regime as unaccountable and as agile as he wants one to be will by its very definition be in a position to, and will, block free market moves of which an overreaching government decides to disapprove.

It’s a failed argument for a failed régime.  It’s time for Lew to pack up and go home.

Happy New Year

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Originally published in 2012, I repeat it here.

This blogger hopes for increasing prosperity for all in the new year just begun.  Following are some additional thoughts, from those better than I.

Dinner was made for eating, not for talking.
–William Makepeace Thackeray

New Year’s Resolution: to tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.
–James Agate

Those who gave thee a body, furnished it with weakness; but He who gave thee Soul, armed thee with resolution.  Employ it, and thou art wise; be wise, and thou art happy.
–Akhenaton

Character is the ability to carry out a good resolution long after the excitement of the moment has passed.
–Cavett Robert

And ye, who have met with Adversity’s blast,
And been bow’d to the earth by its fury;
To whom the Twelve Months, that have recently pass’d
Were as harsh as a prejudiced jury –
Still, fill to the Future! and join in our chime,
The regrets of remembrance to cozen,
And having obtained a New Trial of Time,
Shout in hopes of a kindlier dozen.
–Thomas Hood

We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched.  Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives…not looking for flaws, but for potential.
–Ellen Goodman

New Year’s Day: now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions.  Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.
–Mark Twain

Youth is when you’re allowed to stay up late on New Year’s Eve.  Middle age is when you’re forced to.
–Bill Vaughn

This bit of ’70s-style wisdom:

A year from now, you’re gonna weigh more or less than what you do right now.
–Phil McGraw

And finally,

Let our New Year’s resolution be this: we will be there for one another as fellow members of humanity, in the finest sense of the word.
–Goran Persson