Category Archives: politics

Felons and Voting

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In general, felons have no voting rights—it’s part of their punishment for having committed their crimes.  There also are growing movements to restore voting rights to felons—they are, after all, US citizens.  (I’m eliding here felons who aren’t citizens; they have no voting rights to restore.)

It’s a debate worth having, but a couple of misunderstandings need to be cleared up first.  These misunderstandings are illustrated in a recent Wall Street Journal article.

As the midterm elections draw closer, Dameon Stackhouse is eager to cast a ballot, but he can’t under New Jersey law because he remains on parole after more than a decade behind bars for second-degree robbery.

If he’s on parole, he’s still serving his punishment for his crime; he’s only entered a new stage of that punishment.  With his punishment still in progress, he shouldn’t get his right to vote back.  On successful completion of his parole—successful completion of the punishment society has said is required for his crime—then it’s worth seriously considering reenfranchising him and others in similar situations.

And this, from Stackhouse:

We have no say [without a right to vote].  This is one of the worst things you can do to a citizen.

No, Stackhouse did this to himself with his decision to commit his crime; no one else did this to him as a citizen.  His apparent inability to accept responsibility for the outcomes he created with his misbehavior in addition to the misbehavior itself does not suggest that his rehabilitation is being entirely successful.

I am spring-loaded to restore the franchise to those who’ve successfully completed their punishment—for the vast majority of crimes, there should be an endpoint to the punishment short of death, whether by execution or old age.  But the punishment must be completed before reenfranchisement.

It’s Not Your Company

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Seattle wants to charge a head tax on businesses operating in the city, a tax whose amount would be just what it sounds like—a tax based on the number of hours worked by each employee the business has on its payroll.

In response to the proposal, Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, paused construction on a 17-story office tower in downtown Seattle.

In response to Amazon, the Left in Seattle, spearheaded by the Service Employees International Union-backed activist gang—Working Washington—wants Amazon charged with a felony.

Amazon, after all, doesn’t belong to its investors, and it’s not run by Bezos.  No, the activists, the SEIU, and the city’s governing machine that wants the tax, all insist that Amazon is public property, and it must do what they demand, not what its owners want.

Because those owners don’t own that.  They only hold it in conditional fee from these city Know Betters.

Is Seattle as much a harbinger of future Progressive-Democrat demands as is Jerry Brown’s California?

Update: The Seattle City Council on Tuesday voted 9-0 to impose the head tax, although rather than being based on hours worked per employee, it’s a flat head tax: $275 per employee per year.

Budget Commitments

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Recall the hoo-raw raised when President Donald Trump signed a Republican-authored budget-busting budget [sic] earlier this year.  Now he wants to send up some rescissions to an earlier budget, with indications that he’ll submit further rescissions to the just-signed thing.

There’s a kerfuffle brewing in the Senate, and it’s not from the Progressive-Democrats there.

…[Senator Mitch (R, KY)] McConnell, who told Fox News that rescission would jeopardize future budget negotiations with Democrats: “You can’t make an agreement one month and say, “OK, we really didn’t mean it.'”

He’s right on this. The prior agreement was Congress passing, in 1974, the law that allows rescission. McConnell needs to keep that agreement.  Unless he “really didn’t mean it.”

Fiduciary Duty

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State and local governments are at it again.  Or still.

The value of investments by public pension funds declined last quarter, widening the gap between what these funds say they will earn and what they actually earn.  Pension fund managers—especially government pension fund managers—must make annual “estimates” (they’re actually politically self-serving pie-in-the-sky claims) of the market returns they expect to make on the funds under their nominal care.  These WAGs determine the amount of money “the government that is affiliated with the pension fund must pay into it”.

(Aside: notice the directionality of that emphasis.  The state or local government (and the Federal government with its own public pension funds) is an affiliate of the fund; the fund is not a benefit provided by the government.  Which controls what, now?)

But these fiduciary money managers have been off, and not just occasionally.  They’ve consistently overstated the returns they claim they’ll get compared to the returns they actually get.  Currently, these worthies are claiming they’ll get a return of 7.25% on the taxpayers’ monies with which they’re entrusted and from which they’re promising the funds’ beneficiaries retirement payouts.  The reality is that these worthies have only been able to get 6.49% on average over the last 20 years.

That difference—0.0076%–that’s just chump change; who cares?  Us taxpayers should, and so should the funds’ retirees.  On a $1 million investment—a tiny fraction of many of state-level pension funds, but a significant part of most county- and city-level pension funds, the three-quarters of one per cent difference over those 20 years works out to a more than $4 million dollar difference.

Where’s the money?

How is this not a violation of fiduciary duty?

The JCPOA, Trump, Europe, and Progressive-Democrats

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Most of you are aware that President Donald Trump has taken the steps required to withdraw from the Obama-Kerry-engineered arrangement whereby Iran would be delayed—maybe—from getting nuclear weapons instead of getting them sooner.  Among those steps are a 90-day window within which several existing business arrangements can be wound down before a set of sanctions gets reinstated and a 180-day window within which the rest of the business arrangements can be wound down before another, more stringent, set of sanctions gets reinstated, or added.

Now we have the European signatories, Great Britain, Germany, and France decrying the withdrawal and insisting that we should have stayed in the thing.  Never mind the evident weaknesses in the JCPOA (including in particular an inability to inspect thoroughly and on a no-notice basis, so we have no way of confirming that Iran is complying at all) and the additional factors of concern—that Iran is actively pursuing a missile delivery system for its nuclear weapons, actively funding its client terrorist entities around the Middle East, and directly fomenting unrest and open rebellion around the Middle East.

We should have been willing to renegotiate rather than withdraw.  This is disingenuous.  Great Britain, Germany, and France have had the 16 months since Trump’s inauguration to renegotiate; they’ve refuse to do so.  Even French President Emmanuel Macron, who claimed to be willing to renegotiate, turned out to be only talking; he made no concrete proposals.  Never mind that Iran has said it will not renegotiate.

Meanwhile, Great Britain, France, and Germany are conducting their separate negotiations with Iran.

Now we also have Progressive-Democrats decrying the withdrawal and insisting that the Trump administration should use those windows to conduct negotiations (with the Progressive-Democrats, too) with a view to improve the JCPOA and plug its weaknesses and address those additional factors of concern.  Never mind that Iran has said it will not renegotiate.

Never mind, either, that the Progressive-Democrats have already had those same 16 months in which to renegotiate, and they’ve refused to do so.  All these worthies have been willing to do is insist that the JCPOA be kept intact, until very lately—and even lately, on claiming that the thing’s weaknesses could be plugged, they’ve declined to offer any solutions, only to make demands to…talk.

Trump took a lot of heat for not acting immediately on his inauguration to keep his campaign promise to withdraw from the JCPOA.  Instead, he gave our European partners and our Progressive-Democrats those 16 months to negotiate and arrive at a better arrangement vis-à-vis Iran’s nuclear weapons programs and its serial and concurrent misbehaviors.  They refused.

It’s no wonder that the United States had to act unilaterally, and that this administration has had to act in the face of active Progressive-Democrat obstruction.