Category Archives: politics

Another Bit of Foolishness

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And another incentive for businesses to relocate.

San Francisco is looking to tax robots because they are taking rote jobs that humans do.  They’re not the first to consider such a thing, but it’s still foolish.  Never mind, especially with minimum wage laws pricing the unskilled and/or poorly educated out of work, that robots do the jobs more cheaply.  Robots are more reliable, too, as Security guard Eric Leon noted about a security robot:

He doesn’t complain.  He’s quiet.  No lunch break.  He’s starting exactly at 10.

The robot also doesn’t take sick leave or parental leave or any of the other labor froo-froo that San Francisco has mandated, regardless of what an employer and employee might work out between themselves without Know Betters’ dubious help.

If a business is going to be prevented from lowering its cost of doing business, it has little incentive to stay put.  And human consumers, facing artificially elevated prices, aren’t helped a whit.

Interagency Coordination

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Despite being dead for years, hundreds of veterans remained on the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) payroll and received nearly $38 million in benefits, according to a report from the Social Security inspector general.

The SSA says this is the fault of the VA for not supplying accurate information, and it may well be.

Unfortunately, though, this failure isn’t unique to the VA.

The SSA, Medicare, and the IRS badly coordinate routinely, so that it’s often the case that Medicare recipients get overcharged for their Medicare premiums until the IRS and CMS (which runs Medicare) catch up with each other or the recipient appeals (which actually is a pretty prompt process, but it needn’t occur in the first place).

It’s also the case that the IRS and ObamaMart don’t coordinate well, so that Obamacare subsidies either are wrongly withheld or are wrongly paid.

It’s also the case at the State level, most blatantly in our voting records where the State agencies don’t coordinate to remove ineligible or non-existent voters from the rolls, or (more rarely, but at a non-zero rate) eligible voters are absent from the rolls.

Most Cabinets and Agencies fail to share information—sometimes for good reasons, but too often from laziness or incompetence or turf imperatives.

Dithering

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A brief word.  There are three speeds that are important in this world: the speed of politics, the speed of business, and the speed of national security.

The speed of politics can be useful when trying to build Congressional and Congress-White House coalitions to enact legislation of a general domestic nature.  Such a speed can be useful, for instance, in developing such coalitions to enact legislation for local and national infrastructure repair and development, or for serious tax reform, or for reducing Federal spending (as opposed to reducing the rate of growth in Federal spending), or for immigration reform.

The speed of business, on the other hand, is optimal when rescinding overweening Federal regulations (for instance, eliminating unnecessary regulation-mandated spending), canceling or creating Executive Orders, pushing nominations through the Senate, enacting specific legislation—spending bills for each of the twelve appropriations venues, for instance.  There’s no need for politics here; businesses—our free market economy—are hurting, and such specifics do not need to be dithered over while politicians virtue signal.

Finally, the speed of national security must needs be very rapid: our nation’s safety demands it.  The speed of national security, to take a current example, involves working with the Republic of Korea, Japan, and Israel to beef up their missile defense capability.  Why Israel?  Iron Dome works.  The speed of national security includes advising the People’s Republic of China that it no longer can dither, stall, engage in idle chit chat; concrete action must be taken by them to cut off their client’s access to the outside world’s economy, resources, funds, technology.  It must force northern Korea to stand down from their nuclear weapons and missile programs and do so with more concreteness and permanence than past efforts—by us, too—have done.  The PRC must do this now, or we’ll act in concert with the RoK and Japan or unilaterally, but without the PRC’s involvement; we won’t wait on them.  And the PRC won’t like the outcome.

Three speeds, each useful in its own milieu.  Using the slower speed in the faster lanes is just dithering, and it threatens our national welfare.

College Pupils and Administrators

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Jean Twenge, a Psychology Professor at San Diego State University, theorizes that the problems the current generation of college pupils has with free speech stems from their having spent “their entire adolescence with smartphones in their hands,” thereby avoiding missing the rough and tumble of face to face interactions with other children, and from their having led an otherwise dismayingly soft life:

iGen’ers grew up in an era of smaller families and protective parenting. They rode in car seats until they were in middle school, bounced on soft-surface playgrounds and rarely walked home from school. For them, unsurprisingly, safety remains a priority, even into early adulthood.

And

Nor are they just concerned about physical safety. The iGen teens I have interviewed also speak of their need for “emotional safety”—which, they say, can be more difficult to protect.  …  This is a distinctively iGen idea: that the world is an inherently dangerous place because every social interaction carries the risk of being hurt. You never know what someone is going to say, and there’s no way to protect yourself from it.

Twenge’s thesis certainly is a major component.  However, she has missed another major component.

School pupil populations always have had a significant fraction of crybabies and snowflakes. What’s also changed is the onset of cowardice by college/university faculty and administrators. When pupils look to college administrators to settle disputes, for instance, those administrators need to have the courage to say, “No, settle your own dispute” instead of taking the easy way and intervening in order to quiet the squawling toddlers.

When pupils cry that it’s administrators’ jobs to create homes and not an intellectually challenging environments, those administrators need to have the courage—here the integrity—to say, “No, go back home; this isn’t the place for you.”

When pupils riot over their manufactured hurt-feelings re speakers of whose speech they style themselves afraid or disapproving, those pupils need to be arrested and brought to trial for their crimes; administrators must encourage police in this rather than build their administrator escape hatches through which to scuttle away from a problem that, in large part, is of their creation.

Related—closely—is a Letter to the Editor by Oriel College, Oxford, albeit of uncertain provenance, addressing a pupil who decided to be offended by a statue to Cecil Rhodes.  Here’s the money quote, via WillowSpring, writing for Ricochet:

Cecil Rhodes’s generous bequest has contributed greatly to the comfort and well being of many generations of Oxford students—a good many of them, dare we say it, better, brighter, and more deserving than you.

This does not necessarily mean we approve of everything Rhodes did in his lifetime – but then we don’t have to. Cecil Rhodes died over a century ago. Autres temps, autres moeurs. If you don’t understand what this means—and it would not remotely surprise us if that were the case—then we really think you should ask yourself the question: “Why am I at Oxford?”

And

And then please explain what it is that makes your attention grabbing campaign to remove a listed statue from an Oxford college more urgent, more deserving than the desire of probably at least 20,000 of those 22,000 students to enjoy their time here unencumbered by the irritation of spoilt, ungrateful little tossers on scholarships they clearly don’t merit using racial politics and cheap guilt-tripping to ruin the life and fabric of our beloved university.

Understand us and understand this clearly: you have everything to learn from us; we have nothing to learn from you.

I might have added words with the effect of further calling out this precious snowflake: “This school exists in large part because of that Evil Man’s evil money, and so you’re able to present yourself with your whine in large part because of that Evil Man’s evil money.  Of course, you knew of Cecil Rhodes and his donation well in advance because Mumsy told you before you applied.  So, indeed: why are you here?”

Prioritize, Guys

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President Donald Trump’s national infrastructure plan centers on glorified seed money directed to the localities looking to improve/build out their infrastructure.  The idea is that the locals know their needs best, those needs should be funded primarily locally or from within the nation’s private economic sector, and the building out will aggregate into a vastly improved national infrastructure—real bottom up development, with a little help from the Feds.

To that end, Trump is going to propose $200 billion in Federal spending be committed to a total $1 trillion infrastructure development collection of projects (OK, considerable help).

Right now the dynamic is: come, ask for a whole lot, bang on the table, have your economic studies showing the tens of thousands of jobs that will be created, have your regional study saying this will transform America, bang on the table some more, hire some lobbyists and you get money.  We’d rather have people come and say, “Listen, we’re chipping in this much, give us this little increment and we can make this thing happen.”

Naturally, the locals are getting their knickers twisted.  The ones with the biggest projects

say that local cost-sharing and private financing efforts would fall well short of making up for sharply reduced federal funding.

Nonsense.  You don’t get to freeload off Uncle Sugar, anymore.  Project leads in Chicago or Dallas don’t have a claim on the (tax) money of the good citizens of New York or California, and under the administration plan, they won’t be allowed to exercise their false claim to OPM.  New York and California will be able to keep their money for their own local projects.

This is an example of the deer in the headlights response of folks so used to the Government teat that they can’t conceive of better alternatives [emphasis added]:

Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Democratic New York Governor Andrew Cuomo have said they expect the federal government to cover half the cost of the Gateway project, which also includes bridges and track improvements.

“There’s no people or economic activity in that region that could possibly cover the cost of that?” said the administration official, when asked about a recent appeal by Mr Cuomo for federal aid for the project. “I think that’s a tough sell, would be my response.”

The suggestion that New York and New Jersey could pay their own way on the project…shocked some of the tunnel’s advocates.

Prioritize, guys.  On what are you spending your citizens’ money that you think is more important than your Gateway?  Say that out loud, so your citizens—your constituents, your bosses—can hear you.