Category Archives: ethics

Some Government Spending

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Progressives in Congress and the White House are loathe to reduce spending—especially actual reductions, not just the reduced rates of growth that they, along with too many Republicans, masquerade as spending reductions.  This reluctance is part of why they’ve been so indisposed toward passing a budget, which would make their spending excesses even more apparent.

Bret Baier, of Fox News, though, has dug out some numbers illustrating the present excesses.  Just last November, for instance, the Federal government collected $5 billion in total revenue, while spending $11 billion, each day of the month, for a spending excess of $6 billion per day.  The table includes Baier’s numbers and provides some of the biggest spending sources.  (The Totals sums won’t agree  between across and down due to rounding.)

Spender Daily Tab ($billion) Monthly Tab ($billion) Projected Annual Tab ($billion)
Department of Health and Human Services

3

90

1,080
Social Security

2.5

75

900
Department of Defense

1.8

54

648
interest on the national debt

0.85

25.6

307.4
Totals

8.2

244.6

2,935

Notice that the two biggest spenders are Obamacare—HHS—and Social Security: two of the entitlements which the Progressives have already said are not negotiable—no matter the damage to our economy.

Notice further that those $300+ billion in debt interest are utterly withdrawn from our economy; it’s just the vig on our debt.  Those dollars don’t circulate.  Moreover, that vig doesn’t pay down the debt a single fēn (分).  Then, too, when interest rates revert to our historical levels in the neighborhood of 5% from our current roughly 0.25%, those interest payments will explode to the region of $6,148 billion—over $6 trillion.  Per year.

No wonder the Progressives are so reluctant to discuss spending or actual deficit elimination and debt reduction.  That would be hard.

The Future of American Youth?

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In France, we’re seeing the impact on the nation’s youth of their government-managed economy, magnified by the union-driven difficulty (near impossibility, actually) of getting rid of extraneous labor (or even bad workers).  Spiegel Online International offers some insight.

Kafui Affram doesn’t feel at home in either environment, not in the suburb where the 22-year-old still lives in his childhood room in his parents’ little house [or in Paris, his suburb’s parent city].

Still living with his parents.  Just like America’s youth, especially in the Age of Obamacare.

Some 23 percent of the country’s 18- to 24-year-olds live in poverty, according to a study by the National Institute for Youth and Community Education (INJEP).

The poverty rate for America’s youth as recently as 2009 was 20%.  It’s not going to improve any time soon; the unemployment rate for America’s youth was 17.1% in July 2012, at the height of the summer season for employing our youth, and the unemployment rate for their parents has been hovering around 10% for the last four years after factoring in the effect of our shrinking labor participation rate.  Then,

Youth unemployment in France has been high for some time, but it has now climbed to 26%.  For decades, regardless of their political affiliation, lawmakers have been promising to create a better situation for young people.  But exactly the opposite has happened.  Labor laws protect those who already enjoy steady jobs, while the economic crisis and recession have limited the number of new jobs created.

On Socialist President François Hollande and his program for creating of “future jobs,” Affram says,

We’re used to politicians constantly coming up with new ideas.

Yeah, we’ve heard that, too, and from the same sort of source.  With the same degree of confidence that Affram has:

I know I should be optimistic and have goals, but it’s mostly all just bleak.

Now is Not the Time

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…to surrender.  Yet that’s what Peter Berkowitz advocates Conservatives do in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed [emphasis added].

Conservatives should…come to grips with two entrenched realities that pose genuine challenges to liberty, and whose prudent management is critical to the nation’s well-being.

The first entrenched reality is that big government is here to stay.  This is particularly important for libertarians to absorb.  Over the last two hundred years, society and the economy in advanced industrial nations have undergone dramatic transformations. And for three-quarters of a century, the New Deal settlement has been reshaping Americans’ expectations about the nation-state’s reach and role.

…

In these circumstances, conservatives must redouble their efforts to reform sloppy and incompetent government and resist government’s inherent expansionist tendencies and progressivism’s reflexive leveling proclivities.  But to reform sloppy and incompetent government and resist government’s inherent expansionist tendencies and progressivism’s reflexive leveling proclivities reflects a distinctly unconservative refusal to ground political goals in political realities.

Conservatives can and should focus on restraining spending, reducing regulation, reforming the tax code, and generally reining in our sprawling federal government. But conservatives should retire misleading talk of small government. Instead, they should think and speak in terms of limited government.

Yet the only way to “reform sloppy and incompetent government and resist government’s inherent expansionist tendencies and progressivism’s reflexive leveling proclivities” is to shrink the government back to a manageable size—to regain the small, limited government we used to have and that is created in the documents of our social compact.  Limited government and small government are inseparable; they are two sides of the same coin.  Yes, yes, monarchies can be small governments, too.  But they’re not limited.

Accepting the status quo and declining to seek to “reform sloppy and incompetent government and resist government’s inherent expansionist tendencies and progressivism’s reflexive leveling proclivities” by shrinking—limiting—that over-large and out of control government is most assuredly an unconservative thing to do; it is to accede to the modern Liberal’s goal.

Berkowitz seems not recognize the role reversal that has occurred.  The modern Conservative is the 18th Century Liberal—the champion of limited government that protects and enhances individual liberty, individual responsibility, and the resulting national prosperity.  The modern Liberal is the 18th Century Conservative, a man who favored government control over men’s lives on the theory that both the common man was too stupid to see to his own ends and that Government—the King—Knows Better.  The only difference between the modern Liberal and that 18th Century monarchist is the accepted superficial structure of the Big Government that Knows Better.

Berkowitz’ second entrenched reality,

…this one testing social conservatives, is the sexual revolution, perhaps the greatest social revolution in human history[]

is wholly irrelevant without the individual freedom and responsibility available only with small, limited government.  With government determining what our lives should be like and how we should live them, things like the sexual revolution and our responses to them also are for governments to determine.

Even under the shadow of big government and in the wake of the sexual revolution, both libertarians and social conservatives, consistent with their most deeply held beliefs, can and should affirm the dignity of the person and the inseparability of human dignity from individual freedom and self-government. They can and should affirm the dependence of individual freedom and self-government on a thriving civil society, and the paramount importance the Constitution places on maintaining a political framework that secures liberty by limiting government.

Indeed, but a modern Conservative is not a libertarian—and he never was.  Moreover, the “social conservative” is a modern invention, defined less by social mores than by opposition to the mores of the modern Liberal.  And the affirmation of the need of civil society as one means of guaranteeing “individual freedom and self-government” and that “political framework that secures liberty by limiting government” separately and together demand an actual limiting of government—its size and the reach of its powers.

Online Sales Taxes and State Revenues

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Governor Christine Gregoire (D, WA) and Sally Jewell, President and CEO of REI, have an op-ed in a recent Wall Street Journal.  In it, they claim a desire to “level the sales-tax playing field” by imposing a national requirement for online retailers to pay local state sales taxes.

Local retailers—who create jobs for our families, friends and neighbors—have long been required to collect and remit state sales taxes.  By contrast, online vendors that operate from out of state are under no such requirement, even though the taxes are still owed by the consumer in the 45 states that collect sales taxes.  This disparity undermines the competitiveness of the retail marketplace….

They claim a “cost:”

… diverts $23 billion from state and local treasuries every year.

And

For every supposedly tax-free sale, fewer dollars are available for schools, infrastructure, public-safety providers or (in flush times) tax reductions.

Never mind that online retailers also create jobs for “families, friends and neighbors.”  Those families, friends, and neighbors aren’t constituents of any concern.  Never mind the evident lack of tax reductions.  There’s always a good cause on which Democrats—and too many Republicans—should spend OPM.

A clue bat is here, in Gregoire’s and Jewell’s own words, but the bat swung and missed [emphasis added]:

Imagine a customer who walks into a sporting-goods store and asks for help in buying the coolest new running shoes.  An attentive salesperson spends half an hour with the customer to find the most comfortable fit, the best performance and the right price.  Just as the salesperson thinks she has found the ideal pair, the customer decides to make the $100 purchase via smartphone from an online competitor who doesn’t charge sales tax.

They omit another path to “leveling the playing field:” lower their in-state sales and other taxes levied on their brick and mortar businesses.  Watch the increase in economic activity from the suddenly lowered costs to the consumer/taxpayer, which increase will produce a net increase in revenues for the state government.  Besides which, the states (and I’m not just picking on Washington here) have not established they really need all that revenue, that they really are not doing things better left to the private sector.

Public pension systems have become famous for their bloat, for the overly optimistic assumptions state governments make concerning expected rates of return and state bureaucrat investment acumen.  Were these moved from defined benefit to defined contribution, the private sector would do a fine job of managing these public employee retirement programs, for instance.  As a first step in this transition, the state governments should publish widely the return on investment assumptions on which they base their pension benefit and taxpayer contribution requirements; alongside these, state governments should publish their empirically achieved return on investments.

Schools?  Get out of the way of school choice in the hands of the parents.  Pouring more money into the coffers of failing public schools only enriches the unions running those schools; it does nothing for the students damaged by those schools.

Infrastructure?  Stop paying union rates for the construction unless those rates win a truly competitive bid process.

And so on.

It’s for the several states to fix their own gaping potholes on America’s Main Streets.

There’s Secession and There’s Secession

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There are petitions on the White House’s Web site, signed by a sufficient number of petitioners to require a response from the White House, advocating secession from the union by various states.  These are being carefully ignored, but that’s a different story.

In Wisconsin, when the democratic process went against Democrats, those Democrats seceded from Wisconsin, decamping for motels in Illinois.  They remained in their state of rebellion for weeks, paralyzing Wisconsin’s government, attempting to destroy the democratic process they hated so much.

In Indiana, when the democratic process went against Democrats, those Democrats seceded from Indiana, also decamping for motels in Illinois.  They remained in their state of rebellion for weeks, paralyzing Indiana’s government, attempting to destroy the democratic process they hated so much.

Now, in Michigan, when the democratic process went against Democrats, those Democrats seceded from Michigan, this time relocating nearby.  That these Democrats’ rebellion failed so quickly (but not for lack of effort) was only because Michigan’s laws made the Michigan Democrats’ secession toothless.  There were sufficient majorities (and no need for supermajorities) in both houses of the state’s government from non-Democratic Party representatives and senators to form a quorum in each house, and neither the Michigan government nor Michigan citizens’ continued access to democracy were harmed materially by the Democrats’ rebellion.

The state citizens’ petitions to secede from the union were never serious efforts to depart; they were protests of an overweening federal government, gestures only.

The Democrats’ secessions from those three state governments were not gestures.  They were conducted for the avowed purpose of bringing down those democratically elected governments so Democrats could impose their minority will on the majority; so Democrats could override the will of the citizens as implemented by their elected representatives to their governments.  What the Democrats could not achieve through the democratic process they attempted to force into being by force of rebellion.

“Elections have consequences.”  But those consequences are acceptable only when they serve Progressive ends.  That’s the face of Progressivism and the Democratic Party today: rather than abide by a democratic election result, secede and try to prevent government from functioning.