Tag Archives: ethics

Works for Me

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Senator Chris Murphy (D, CT) has his gun control panties all knotted up because lots of county sheriffs have said they won’t enforce intrinsically unconstitutional gun control laws.

I think we have to have a conversation about whether we can continue to fund law enforcement in states where they are refusing to implement these gun laws[.]

I’ve addressed whether local and county jurisdictions should accept State funding for this or that purpose or whether they, instead, should decline the funds and free themselves from higher government’s controlling strings.

At the national level, Murphy’s terms are acceptable.

Child Tax Credit

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And other tax credits. Scott Hodge was one of the developers of the Child Tax Credit more than 25 years ago, and today he thinks the idea—well intended as it was—turns out to be bad tax and social policy (did I hear a sotto voce “unintended consequences?”).

His Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed went into detail on how the child tax credit, along with the subsequent proliferation of tax credits, turned out to be heavily counterproductive, reducing family prosperity through reducing the number of workers—who are family members—in the work force and thereby reducing overall GDP.

But the kicker of his piece was his closer.

No wonder the IRS is dysfunctional—it’s not equipped to be a social-service agency.
The “put money in people’s pockets” approach of the child tax credit might have been good politics, but 25 years’ experience shows it was bad policy. The country needs a tax agenda that promotes growth and opportunity, not handouts and redistribution.

Indeed.

The best tax agenda for growth and opportunity promotion begins with taking our tax code, and so the IRS, out of the social engineering milieu altogether. Tax collections should be limited (at the Federal level at least; although State tax codes would benefit from similar changes) to the Constitutionally mandated purposes of pay[ing] the Debts and provid[ing] for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States. Keeping in mind, too, that the general Welfare of the United States is itself limited to the items enumerated in our Constitution’s Article I, Section 8.

That tax agenda concludes with enacting a tax code that eliminates business income taxes altogether (keeping in mind that it’s the business’ customers who pay the lion’s share of those taxes, anyway, in the form of higher prices, while the rest of us pay in the form of reduced innovation and fewer jobs). That adjustment needs to go along with setting a single flat tax rate on all personal income from any source, with no deductions, credits, subsidies, surcharges, or any of the other froo-froo currently extant in our existing byzantine and mendacious tax code.

But What is the Or Else?

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President Joe Biden (D) is right, this time, and so are Congressional politicians (assuming they actually can get anything done on this), to move to block the coming railroad strike.

But. But, but, but.

What is the or else here? What enforcement mechanism can the government use to enforce its no-strike diktat against the railroad workers? Not against the unions, but against the rail workers?

It isn’t union leadership, after all, who have rejected the just-negotiated agreements, it’s the rank-and-file, the folks who actually do the work, who’ve rejected the agreement.

How would the government deal with the rail worker equivalent of the Blue Flu?

How would the government deal with another standard union tactic: working explicitly and exactly to the letter of the relevant regulations and the letter of the law about to be imposed on the railroad businesses and labor unions, with the result of a drastic slowdown in work performance?

How would the government deal with an overt strike, where the workers of one or more of the four unions explicitly walk off the job (and the workers of the other unions walk out in solidarity or at the least refuse to cross the picket lines)?

Mass arrests in the latter case? Where would the government find the replacement workers? The rail lines still would be shut down until those replacement workers could be found and hired, assuming anyone qualified actually would be interested.

Certainly, civil action with civil—financial—penalties could be taken, but how much will those matter if the union workers themselves have already determined they have nothing to lose? Their beef, after all, isn’t about higher wages, it’s about the quality of the work environment and work benefits, canonized by the number of sick days allowed.

I’ve seen no evidence that anyone in the Federal government is thinking about a response to the possibility the workers call government’s…bluff(?).

Whose Choice Is It?

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And whose property is it?

A new law being seriously considered by lawmakers in New York City could strip landlords of the ability to perform criminal background checks on prospective tenants.

Because landlords shouldn’t be able to control who rents their property, shouldn’t be able to protect the interests of their existing tenants—who have, by dint of their rent agreements, have some property of their own in the landlord’s buildings.

This law means it’s city government property; landlords possess the buildings only in fee from the city lords.

Republican Councilwoman Inna Vernikov has the right of it:

A bill which would prohibit landlords from conducting criminal background checks of potential tenants. Murdered someone? Beat up your girlfriend? Robbed? Stabbed your neighbor? No problem. Come live among us!

Certainly felons, even violent felons, shouldn’t be blanketly denied a second chance, shouldn’t be blanketly denied an opportunity to demonstrate that they’ve rehabilitated themselves, shouldn’t be blanketly denied an opportunity at redemption.

But that should be the choice of the property owner, the landlord; it cannot be, legitimately, a choice forced upon the property owner, in a one-size-fits-all diktat by the Lords of the city.

Maybe It’s Time

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The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction reported to Congress at the end of October that

for the first time in its history [SIGAR was] unable this quarter to provide Congress and the American people with a full accounting of this US government spending [in Afghanistan] due to the noncooperation of several US government agencies.
The United States Agency for International Development, which administers the majority of US government spending for Afghanistan, and the Treasury Department refused to cooperate with SIGAR in any capacity while the State Department was selective in the information it provided pursuant to SIGAR’s audit and quarterly data requests.

These refusals directly violate current law regarding fund expenditure reporting requirements and are yet further examples of the disdain for inconvenient law held by members and supporters of the Progressive-Democratic Party.

Maybe it’s time to defund entirely the USAID and to drastically reduce funding for Treasury and State. That would significantly reduce the amount of government spending that would go unreported.

It’ll be difficult and noisy to do, though, since the Progressive-Democratic Party politicians controlling the Senate and White House agree that this badly needed information should be covered up.