Tag Archives: government

Wages of Government Controls

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…Cyprus example.  Deposits continue to shrink (read: disappear from the country) in the country’s banking system.  As the Wall Street Journal last week cited the European Commission as reporting [emphasis added],

the radical shake-up of the banking sector coupled with unprecedented restrictions on the movement of capital in and out of the tiny island have left it exposed to deep economic pitfalls.

And

Confidence in Cyprus’s banks has plunged after the bail-in of depositors, culminating in the gradual flight of deposits despite the government’s imposition of capital controls to stem the outflow[.]

Why?  Not despite the government’s controls, but because of them.  The Cypriot government

appropriate[ed] all uninsured deposits above €100,000 [$135,000] to pay for [Cyprus Popular Bank]’s resolution.  The biggest bank, Bank of Cyprus, underwent a long, deep restructuring, during which 47.5% of uninsured deposits were blocked and then converted into shares in the new bank.

Whether the depositors wanted a slice of a failing bank or not.  Whether that slice could be used to put food on a depositor’s table, or pay his rent, or not.

People found a way to get their money and get it out of the government’s reach.  And now it’s hard to find money to loan, even to a willing borrower.  Because there’s no money to lend to support business expansion, it’s hard to hire.  Because there’s no money to lend to roll existing debt, bankruptcies occur, and jobs are lost.  Because there’s no money to lend to cover the time gap between payouts due (e.g., existing debt or payroll) and money arriving (e.g., payments for goods sold), bankruptcies occur.  And so on.

Thus:

17% of the Cypriot workforce would be out of a job this year [reported the EC], up from an original projection of 15.5%, while unemployment will hit 19.6% in 2014, not 16.9% as previously thought.

The wages of government controls are lost jobs.

The Danger of Accepting Federal Money

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…made manifest.

Labor Secretary Thomas Perez…threatened to cashier federal grants for 83 local transit agencies because he claimed California’s pension reforms violate the Federal Transit Act, which requires the Labor Department to certify that “protective” arrangements are made for workers (i.e., the Teamsters) before the feds dole out dough.  Nearly $2 billion in federal funds are at stake this year alone.

And there’s this:

In July, HUD published…”Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” in the Federal Register…a sweeping set of land-use regulations…. The agency wants the power to dismantle local zoning so communities have what it considers the right mix of economic, racial and ethnic diversity.  A finding of discriminatory behavior, or allegations of discrimination, would no longer be necessary.  HUD will supply “nationally uniform data” of what it thinks 1,200 communities should look like.

Local governments will have to “take meaningful actions to further the goals identified.”  If they fail to comply, HUD can cut federal funding.

Of course, if the States weren’t addicted to Federal handouts, the Feds’ pushers wouldn’t be able to make such threats, much less have this control over a State’s internal affairs.

Of Gas and Men

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From historian Andrew Roberts, in The Wall Street Journal, comes this:

There is a long and honorable history of the civilized world treating those dictators who use poison gas as qualitatively different from the normal ruck of tyrants whose careers have so stained the 20th and 21st centuries.

President Obama, who talks endlessly of the importance of civilized values, must now uphold this one.

What he said.  RTWT.

What Do Progressives

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…have against equal opportunity?

The Justice Department is trying to stop a school vouchers program in Louisiana that attempts to help families send their children to independent schools instead of under-performing public schools.

The agency wants to stop the program, led by Republican Gov Bobby Jindal, in any school district that remains under a desegregation court order.

Because, you know, helping students actually to do better so that they can be effectively integrated with their age peers is a Bad Thing.

The federal government argues that allowing students to attend independent schools under the voucher system could create a racial imbalance in public school systems protected by desegregation orders.

After all, parents of underperforming students might wind up aggregating them into schools that actually teach and get academic results in their students.  Since most of the underperforming students in Louisiana tend to be minority children, especially black children, this might tend to aggregate black children into those successful voucher schools rather than leave them trapped in Louisiana’s failing public school system.

Eric Holder’s DoJ made their argument with a straight face.  Consummate actors, they are.

Let’s look at that “minority” status in the Louisiana schools, though.

The New Orleans public school system is 88% African-American.  Now, how could allowing 570 kids to flee the public school system possibly “create a racial imbalance”?

Oh, it’s those minority white students, who would become even more concentrated, that Holder is worrying about.  Yeah, that’s the ticket.  We’ll go with that.

Jindal had this about Holder’s move:

After generations of being denied a choice, parents finally can choose a school for their child, but now the federal government is stepping in to prevent parents from exercising this right.  Shame on them.  Parents should have the ability to decide where to send their child to school.

Can you say disparate impact?  This is the racist outcome—intended or not—of using this meme, even sotto voce.

Immigration and Border Security

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The Senate’s bill on immigration reform purports to include a requirement for border security that must be met before a citizenship path for existing illegal aliens can begin.

Regardless of what we might think about the strength of that requirement, it demands data on current and trigger border security levels.  Those data may not be available:

[CRS and GAO] reports from the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Research Service show the Department of Homeland Security lacks an accurate barometer to measure the success of ramped-up efforts to curtail illegal crossings.
…
…[they have the] number of apprehensions of people coming in illegally….  But those numbers…don’t necessarily show whether an increase or decrease is due to immigration trends, economic shifts, enforcement policies or all of the above.

Because

Apprehensions data…exclude two important groups when it comes to unauthorized migration: aliens who successfully enter and remain in the United States…and aliens who are deterred from entering the United States[.]

That these data are hard to collect (the deterrence factor may be impossible to assess) in no way increases the reliability of apprehensions as a measure of security.

The GAO’s beef also includes a lack of data availability for the several immigration-involved agencies that would benefit from them: “a lack of interagency coordination and information sharing” and “inconsistency in data collection.”

This is just one more example of the lack of reliability of what this government tells us, and in this case it has—or should have—a direct impact on this government’s ability to achieve immigration reform, which is badly needed in any event.