Category Archives: regulation

Trust

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I’m going to poke my nose into European affairs, again.

The backdrop is the French budget crisis. The backdrop to that is this. In one of the EU’s responses to their part in the global economic crisis of 2008-2009, the EU passed the Stability and Growth Pact, which authorized the European Commission, the executive body of the European Union (though the Commission has its own president, the body acts like a President-by-Committee) to require EU member nations to submit their national budgets to Commission approval. If the Commission disapproved the budget and the nation in question refused to make Commission-directed corrections, the Commission could levy very serious fines on that nation.

Among the rules of the Pact is that a national deficit cannot exceed 3% of its GDP: cuts to spending and/or increases in taxes could be required by the Commission to bring the nation’s deficit in line. Various smaller nations in the EU already have been subject to budget disapproval and Commission-required corrections or fines. Belgium, for instance, faced a fine of some €800 million in 2011 ($1,131 million dollars in 2011) until it made corrections. Greece and Italy also have been hit with Commission budget mandated corrections, and they have complied.

Enter France. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has indicated flatly that France will not play by the EU rules to which it is signatory.

I will not permit people to discuss France in this context. France is a big country. We won’t [comply with Commission budget reform requirements].

The French Finance Minister has echoed his boss.

[W]e won’t cut more anywhere, and we also won’t raise taxes.

The Germans, though, despite being economically powerful enough—because it’s still economically sound—to get France to comply, is apparently too timid to do so. Chancellor Angela Merkel has dragged out an old chestnut of hers: “contractual agreements.” These are

written agreements between the European Commission and a Eurozone country that commit that member state to undertake specific savings measures or clearly delineated structural reforms. Under the original plan, the country could then obtain financial aid from a special fund in return. For France, the reward would be a further suspension of the deficit rules.

However. With France saying it’s going to welsh on one contract that it’s signed—that Stability and Growth Pact—how could it be trusted to honor another contract it might sign, a “contractual agreement?”

Manfred Weber, who leads the European People’s Party (think of them as all of Europe’s various Christian Democrats) in European Parliament emphasized the problem.

Europe is at a crossroads. The European Commission’s credibility is at stake with its review of the French and also the Italian budgets. France’s budget has to be rejected. President Hollande needs to make improvements.

There are two questions here. Is the EU’s word worth anything? Can they be trusted to carry out their own mandates? That question won’t be answered until the end of the month, when the Commission will attempt to give its final answer regarding the French budget.

The other question is whether the French word has any value, whether it’s possible to rely on any contract France or a French entity might sign. That question seems clearly answered.

Federal Subsidies and Block Grants

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I’ve written elsewhere about converting Medicaid subsidy transfers to the states to block grants on a declining schedule that eliminates the Medicaid subsidy altogether over a 10 year period.

In an era of excessive Federal government spending, ongoing Federal budget deficits as the normal state of affairs, and the resulting burgeoning Federal debt, it’s time to look at converting all Federal transfers to the states on a declining schedule that eliminates the subsidies altogether over a 10 year period.

It’s time to restore the Federalism to the Federalism concept of our Constitution.

In 2013, the Federal government transferred to the 50 states and an untold number of local governments, just in the form of grants-in-aid, some $450 billion. In 1953, 60 years prior, that number was $0. Between 2008 and 2010, the number rose especially sharply, from $371 (!) billion to a peak of $505 billion.

Total Federal transfer payments were $2.3 trillion in 2013, up from not much more than zero in 1953. Some of that largest recipients of these transfers in 2010 (to mix years of data) were California, getting $63 million; Illinois, getting $19 million; New York, getting $50 million; and Texas, getting $41 million.

This needs to stop.

Federal payments to the states are every bit as addictive for those states as heroin is for a junky; the states will need time to adjust their budgets. Accordingly, I propose taking the 2014 transfer payments to each state as the baseline for that state and beginning in 2015, converting each state’s aggregated collection of transfer payments into a single block grant, with no strings attached—the states need to start learning responsibility and prioritization; the grant should be for the state’s use as it sees fit.

In each year after 2015, the block grant paid to each state should be reduced by 10% of the baseline value so that by the end of 10 years, the transfer payments will be reduced to zero. After that, each state would be required to meet its spending “needs” from its own resources, getting aid from the Federal government—which is to say, for instance, California getting tax money paid by New York citizens, among others—only in an emergency declared and agreed between the state governor and the President.

There would be two outcomes of interest here. The first is that the states would regain their responsibility for their own future, instead of their internal imperatives being dictated by the Federal government through the plethora of strings attached to each of the existing transfers and grants.

The second is that, by eliminating the enormous Federal expenditure, a major step would be taken toward getting Federal spending under control, eliminating the budget deficits that are too routine, and being paying down our outlandish national debt.

Even the Brits

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This is an amazing development for the authors of the Magna Carta. That charter, recall, codified for the first time in Anglo-American history, limits to government’s (king’s at the time) right to intrude into a man’s private affairs and possessions except under some severely constrained conditions: due process of law.

This is that amazement:

Registered gun owners in the United Kingdom are now subject to unannounced visits to their homes under new guidance that allows police to inspect firearms storage without a warrant.

The new policy from the British Home Office went into effect Oct 15, permitting police and constabularies to conduct surprise home visits to legitimate gun owners.

Why else, it turns out, have a gun registry, except to identify those honest citizens in the best position to resist excessive government—like the barons and others who resisted King John’s excesses? Like those later colonial Americans who resisted King George III’s excesses?

And this is where our own gun control lobby and the Progressives in our own government are headed.

Politicizing Ebola

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And right before a major election, too.

On Oct 12, the Agenda Project Action Fund released a political ad called “Republican Cuts Kill,” which according to the group, has been scheduled to air in Kentucky, North Carolina, Kansas, and South Dakota—all states with high-stakes Senate elections in November. The ad juxtaposes pictures of dead bodies and body bags in West Africa with Republican lawmakers like Sens Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul.

“Like rabid dogs in a butcher shop, Republicans have indiscriminately shredded everything in their path, including critical programs that could have dealt with the Ebola crisis before it reached our country,” said ad producer [Agenda Project Action Fund] Erica Payne[.]

Never mind some facts.

In both 2013 and 2014, it was Congress that boosted the funding after the administration had proposed scaled-back budgets.

[W]hen the 2014 budget was passed in January, the CDC’s budget rose to $6.9 billion, $567 million more than it received in 2013 and more than the agency anticipated, as the president only requested $6.6 billion.

…double the budget the CDC was getting in 2000 ($3.4 billion)[.]

And

With NIH, the numbers have edged up from $28.5 billion in 2006 to $30.14 billion in 2014….

And

…this administration [has been] pushing the CDC to spend time and resources on bike lanes and farmers markets instead of prioritizing national security and the health of Americans[.]

Projects like origami condoms, to the tune of $2.4 million, a part of nearly $40 million of CDC funding that The Washington Free Beacon reports could have been…better used.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has spent more than $39 million on obese lesbians, origami condoms, texting drunks, and dozens of other projects that could have been scrapped in favor of developing an Ebola vaccine.

And not a single Democrat has corrected this distortion, not a single Democrat has distanced himself from this distortion. Their silence demonstrates their condoning this politicization.

Elections are soon.

A Tidbit

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…of a concept that’s lost on one of the main groups of central planners of the world, those of Russia.

This one comes from an article in Pravda, which plays a role for the Russian government similar to that of The New York Times for the Democratic Party’s administrations. Interestingly, in addition to being missed by the Pravda author, it’s also missed by Tom Friedman, who cited the article in his NYT article.

The context is an alleged oil war being waged by the US and Saudi Arabia against Russia and Iran, an attempt, supposedly, to destroy those two nation’s economies. (I say “alleged” and “supposedly” because of course President Barack Obama wouldn’t do such a thing. Both he prefers engagement with our enemies over contesting with them, and an oil war would be inconsistent with Obama’s promise to Vladimir of greater flexibility in this post-2012 election period. Besides, the Pravda author denies the existence of a war, so that settles it.)

The tidbit from Pravda:

The planned economy of the Soviet Union was not able to cope with falling export revenues [from collapsing oil prices]….

The planned economy was not able to cope.

Planned economies just aren’t flexible enough. More, by introducing like a dam into a river a small body of men into the information stream that is the core of a free market economy, planned economies can’t react with the speed that a freely flowing river of information produces for an unfettered market economy.

This is a fact well known to capitalist economists and empirically demonstrated all over the world, repeatedly, if most dramatically by that Soviet Union collapse.

Unfortunately, this tidbit also is lost on our own central planners, and so we get Obamacare and Dodd-Frank; an explosion of economy-governing rules from EPA, the CFPB, et al; and a burgeoning production of Executive Orders from our Democratic Party President.