Category Archives: regulation

More Big Government

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And more interference from that Big Government.

President Barack Obama has signed is going to sign—and do his usual bragging about signing—an Executive Order requiring all government contractors to give their employees paid sick leave.

On top of that,

The White House wouldn’t specify the cost to federal contractors to implement the executive order, which Obama was to address at a major union rally and breakfast in Boston. The Labor Department said any costs would be offset by savings that contractors would see as a result of lower attrition rates and increased worker loyalty, but produced nothing to back that up.

Neither Obama nor Labor Secretary Thomas Perez produced any data to support their bald claim because they don’t have any. Their position is based solely on the arrogance of “We’re Big Government. We Know Best.”

There is, too, that Democratic Party ethos. Perez said

The Republican Party is out of step with similar conservative governments around the world.

Yeah. Someone else is doing it; therefore, it’s the right thing to do. The rightness or wrongness of the thing isn’t at all inherent in the thing. Popularity creates right. I’ll ignore the fact that Perez’ “around the world” is Europe, and that there aren’t any conservative governments in Europe.

It’s certainly true that paid sick leave has merit. However, the decision about paid sick leave is best left in the hands of the employer and his employees and prospective employees. What other countries, what other domestic companies are doing, has nothing to do with it.

It’s not at all true that every good idea must be turned into a government edict that everyone must follow. Including when the costs of this or that good idea will vary from time to time, situation to situation, company to company, industry to industry.

Especially since Americans are fully capable of acting on their own choices. We’re not as stupid as Big Government assumes us to be.

Irrelevant Questions?

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An 11-year-old successfully defended himself, his 4-year-old sister, and his home during an attempted mid-afternoon home invasion by a 16-year-old and an accomplice, by shooting the 16-year-old and driving off the accomplice. The children’s mother was out at the time.

Now the police are questioning the mother—no word on what they’re doing with the accomplice, who was caught a short time after the successful defense.

[P]olice want to know why the children were home alone and why the 11-year-old had access to a gun.

What’s the problem with being home “alone?” The 4-year-old was being babysat.

Why shouldn’t the boy have access to a weapon? He’s eleven years old, and there’s no indication he’s not been properly trained. He fired a single shot to effect his defense, though—that’s either a potful of luck, or perhaps he’s had the training.

Police believe the mother bought the gun after prior break-in attempts.

There’s a hint there.

The police are wasting resources.

What Do They Know?

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Stanley Kurtz has asked a very important question regarding Hillary Clinton’s disingenuous handling of our nation’s secrets on her personal, private email server while she was sitting in the Secretary of State’s chair (or in her airplane seat as she jet-setted around the world on her State Department travels.

…shouldn’t we be paying more attention to the nature and scale of the damage to American national security caused by Hillary’s carelessness with classified information?

Kurtz also quoted from a Daily Beast piece a related aspect:

[S]enior counterintelligence officials are assuming the worst about what the Russians and Chinese know.

That brings me to my point: there’s no need to assume the worst; by inspecting Clinton’s private server—forensically, if needs be, since by her own admission she’s committed the felony of evidence tampering by deleting a potful of emails—we know what the Russians and Chinese (and the Brits, Israelis, Germans, and any script kiddy with an app) know. We don’t have to spend a lot of resources or money guessing at that.

An Excerpt

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…from a VA Office of the Inspector General report.

We substantiated the second allegation that pending ES [Enrollment System] records included entries for individuals reported to be deceased. As of September 2014, more than 307,000 pending ES records, or about 35 percent of all pending records, were for individuals reported as deceased by the Social Security Administration. However, due to data limitations, we could not determine specifically how many pending ES records represent veterans who applied for health care benefits. These conditions occurred because the enrollment program did not effectively define, collect, and manage enrollment data. In addition, VHA lacked adequate procedures to identify date of death information and implement necessary updates to the individual’s status. Unless VHA officials establish effective procedures to identify deceased individuals and accurately update their status, ES will continue to provide unreliable information on the status of applications for veterans seeking enrollment in the VA health care system.

Not only is the VA not trying to take care of our vets—307,000 of them died waiting to get treatment—they’re not even troubling themselves to keep records.

We substantiated the third allegation that employees incorrectly marked unprocessed applications as completed and possibly deleted 10,000 or more transactions from the Workload Reporting and Productivity (WRAP) tool over the past 5 years.

They do, though, go to the effort of covering up their non-performance (I hesitate to say “failure to perform;” that would suggest they’re trying).

And there’s this insulting bit of vapidity from the Under Secretary for Health in response to the IG’s report (the whole letter is at Appendix D of the report at the link. It doesn’t get any better).

We regret the inconvenience and potential hardship place on applicants for health care and we are working hard to restore Veterans’ confidence and trust in VA’s systems and staff. We have and will continue to take timely and appropriate steps to improve our services to ensure we meet the expectations of those whom we have the honor of serving.

Yeah, dying while on the VA’s who gives a patootie wait list is such a potentially inconvenient hardship.

Since the VA doesn’t care, we should honor their lack of interest. Disband the VA, and use the budget dollars that would have gone to the VA in any particular year as vouchers for our veterans which they can find, in that year, their own quality care and decent hospitals.

Undoing a Unilateral “Presidency”

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Lahnee Chen closed his Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed of a similar title with this:

By revoking Mr Obama’s executive actions, and beginning the arduous task of identifying and addressing his many other unilateral moves, the next president wouldn’t have to jettison the entire Obama legacy.

But our next President should.

On the next president’s first day in office, the president could simply issue an executive order revoking all of his predecessor’s executive actions, except those necessary for national security or the basic functioning of government. This includes Mr Obama’s executive orders, but also a flood of presidential memorandums and directives, as well as informal guidance and orders from federal agencies, that he has used to reshape federal policy.

Not “except for.” Every single one. Don’t waste time sorting through the mess to find the occasional nugget that might be useful. Rescind every single one. The next President should issue his own few Executive Orders regarding those narrow areas of national security and the basic functioning of government. That last, especially, doesn’t need many, since government can, and should be, shrunk drastically by the next President and the next two (at least) Congresses.

In the name of actual transparency, this item, too. Those Presidential Memoranda don’t need to be, and so they’re not, published in the Federal Register, and so the public has very limited access to them. The next President, on day two, should publish those memoranda. Every single one of them.

Keep in mind this, too. It’s not only Obama’s legacy. It’s our nation’s legacy, it’s the legacy of us citizens, it’s your and my legacy. It needs to jettisoned in its entirety, every single syllable. For our national honor.