Tag Archives: government

This Is Entirely Appropriate

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This is the response of Staten Islanders to Sandy and the nor-easter.

A lifelong Staten Island resident, Gennaro, is recruiting volunteers for the local Brown Cross and the Gateway Rotary Foundation to organize supply posts and dispatches along the island.  So far, they have an estimated 2,000 volunteers, many contractors, who are taking matters into their own hands by fixing homes, draining basements, and clearing debris.

Gennaro adds

We are not leaving our properties for other people to rebuild.  There is nowhere for these people to go.  You have to rebuild quickly.  We got to get back up.

This is private citizens and private enterprise acting first.  Government has a role, but it must come second.

Indeed, the promised Federal and state help has been notably absent from Staten Island—even that second-place role is going unfulfilled.  Without making judgments on the Federal or state agencies, they will always be late to the crisis relief and recovery effort.  Government performance on Staten Island simply emphasizes the necessity, as well as the morality, of local community response first and promptly.  Only those on the scene can act quickly.

These folks could still use lots of help, though.

Gennaro says they are in need of building supplies—not food—and private donations that can go directly to families.  He guarantees 90% will go directly to buying warehouse and building materials.  Things like electrical panels, circuit breakers, sheet rock, roofing, boilers, etc.

You can contribute here:

The Outcome

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According to Fox News‘ exit polling and a Fox News interview (sorry about the lead-in ad) with Dick Morris (who had, the day prior to the election, predicted a Romney win at 9:1 odds), the American electorate has changed.  Morris had based his prediction on the electorate makeup of 2008 being an aberration; Tuesday’s results strongly imply that this is now the makeup of our electorate—2012 is not materially different from 2008.

In fact, the changes aren’t great in absolute terms; the black vote was 11% of the electorate in 2004, and the Hispanic vote roughly 8% then.  Those small changes, though, were enough to put Obama over the top, 51%-49% in the popular vote (the Electoral College outcome is a function of the discrete state by state allocation of those votes, despite the fundamental closeness of the popular votes in several states with large Electoral College contingents).

Here are the ethnic group numbers from that exit poll [the last column and row are added by me; numbers don’t sum to 100% due to rounding and because I omitted the 2% “Other” category]:

Are you:

Total

Obama

Romney

 % Total Electorate Voting Obama/Romney

White

72%

39%

59%

28%/42%

Black

13%

93%

6%

12%/2%

Hispanic/Latino

10%

71%

27%

7%/3%

Asian

3%

73%

26%

2%/<1%

Total Non-White % Voting Obama/Romney

21%/5%

 

With this breakout, the Democrats start out with a 4:1 advantage in the non-white demographic.  Even accounting for the black break-out being accentuated by the presence of a black candidate, it seems clear to me that the advantage is strongly for the Democratic Party—still nearly 4:1.

Morris suggests that the Republican Party needs to “change its positions” in order to reach these other folks; otherwise they’ll never win another election.

I disagree.  The conservative Republicans’ positions are sound.  What they need to do is a better job of communicating, a Republican weakness of long-standing.  They need actually to approach these groups and talk directly to them in their neighborhoods.  This is what the Democrats have been doing for years.

Mitt Romney made a speech to the NAACP, but neither he nor his representatives ever went into the local neighborhoods where blacks live.  He never talked directly to blacks.

Mitt Romney’s Spanish-speaking son made a few speeches to Hispanic organizations in Florida, but no one went into the neighborhoods there—or in Texas (which as a state went for Romney, but not the Hispanic population), or in Illinois, or in New York, or in California, or in…—to talk directly to Hispanics where they live.

Mitt Romney didn’t even pay lip service to the Asian demographic.

As I said, Republicans need to improve their communications skills, not alter what they stand for.  Those are sound principles, and they’ll draw all Americans, not just a select few.  Medicare, for instance, was painted as a huge vulnerability for the Republicans—their view that Medicare needed to be sharply revised in order to survive and their specific plan for achieving that revision were supposed to be Republicans’ undoing.  A look at the exit polling at the above link, though, shows the soundness of the Republican position: voters 65 and older went for Romney 56%-44%, and those 45-64—the group beginning to think about and to get serious about planning for retirement—went for Romney 51%-47%.

What are the Republican principles?  Christian Whiton offers a useful summary in a piece that also centers on communications:

…a society that wants to survive must not punish those who play by the rules or are successful.

…a private market allocates resources better than even smart Ivy Leaguers working for a government bureaucracy.

…the American century only ends when we decide we’re no longer exceptional in mankind’s history, and choose the European model of decadent decline over a destiny of freedom and self-reliance.

The principles are worth fighting for (or the United States is no longer that self-reliant, personally responsible, free market nation that it has been heretofore); the message needs to be brought to all of us, not just some.

Disaster Relief

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Government can’t do it.  This isn’t the fault of liberal government or conservative government—government can’t do it.  Only private enterprise and the community of individual volunteers can.

Look at the failures of government response to Katrina, including the failures of the governor of Louisiana and the mayor of New Orleans to do anything at all other than to cry out for Federal relief—and in the case of Governor Kathleen Blanco, a failure to do even that until it was too late for the Feds to be even a little useful.  Then there’s the failure of the Federal relief efforts.  There remain temporary homes in Louisiana depots unused because of bureaucratic failure to get them emplaced and allocated, just as one example.

Private enterprise—Wal*Mart (food, clothing donations, delivery truck capacity), Home Depot (support centers for providing reconstruction materials), Ford Motor (160 used trucks, vans and SUVs for use in the relief effort)—arrived promptly with its own relief effort in progress by the time the Feds arrived.

Private charity and NGO—The American Red Cross, Feeding America (then America’s Second Harvest), Southern Baptist Convention, Salvation Army, Oxfam, Common Ground Collective, Emergency Communities, Habitat for Humanity, Catholic Charities, Service International, “A River of Hope”, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and many others charitable organizations had major roles in the relief effort.

Individual volunteers with expertise—electrical power restoral, flood relief and water damage repair—flowed in from out of the disaster area.

Look at the manifest failures of the governor of New York, the mayor of New York City, and the Federal government with Sandy.  There are lots of photo ops, many tours of the disaster areas, an initial attempt to divert massive police, sanitation, etc resources from relief effort and residential neighborhood security to support a marathon race.  And millions of Americans in New York and New Jersey still are without power, heat, clear roads, fuel for their transportation, even homes.

On the other hand, Verizon, for instance, had 95% of its cell service back up and running within 24 hours of Sandy’s landfall in the affected areas.  AT&T, et al., weren’t far behind.  Home Depot (those guys again) has activated its Disaster Response Command Center and is coordinating merchandise movement and working with the Red Cross (those guys again) for relief effort.  Wal*Mart, by last weekend alone, had donated 60 pallets of dry food and beverages and nearly 6,000 cases of cleaning supplies.

Private charity and NGO—all those listed above—are active in their own roles.

Volunteer utility workers have flowed in to help with power restoral, marathon runners, with their contest cancelled, switched to doing their own resupply efforts to beleaguered neighborhoods, relying on shank’s mare to get supplies in where motorized delivery couldn’t go.

William McGurn, writing in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, argues that these failures demonstrate the failures of liberal government.  From this conservative’s perspective, McGurn makes some good points:

…the great vulnerability of 21st-century American liberalism: an inability to set the priorities necessary for good government.  As a result, government grows both bigger and less capable, especially for people who do not have the resources to fund other options.

He’s right as far as he goes, but as I opened this post, this isn’t a failure of liberal government alone—it’s a failure of government.  This isn’t because the wrong people have the wrong ideas, but because the idea is wrong.  Government cannot do disaster recovery.

Government has an important role to play in disaster recovery, but that role is coordination; assistance in allocation of effort and resources; short-term, stop-gap, hand up funding.  It is not the doing itself.  As I wrote here,

Government didn’t build anything; it just acted as middle man for a small part of all that private building.

Disaster relief is just a subset of that building.

When Greed Meets Tinker Bell

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State pension funds are another time bomb of malaise (to the tune of a $1.4 trillion shortfall) waiting to explode, and Rhode Island provides an example of the difficulty we each, in our own state, face in defusing it.

Rhode Island passed a massive overhaul (as such things go; they have a long way, yet, before they’ve completely cured their problem) of their state retirement system last year, including such unheard-ofs as raising the retirement age, suspending pension increases for several years, and generating a hybrid retirement plan that combines traditional pensions with 401(k)-like accounts.  Rhode Island’s General Treasurer, Gina Raimondo, says that this reform will save Rhode Islanders $4 billion over the next 20 years (compared to a 2013 budget that proposes spending $8 billion in that year alone, small potatoes, indeed, but a critical start).  This minor reform also seeks to redress astonishing conditions that include 58 percent of retired teachers and 48 percent of state retirees receiving more in their pensions than in their final years of work.

But it’s too much change for some.  The public “service” unions (service: you service me) object: it’s somehow wrong for their members to be responsible for their own retirement funding.  Even a little bit.  Instead, these public “service” unions protest that it’s all unfair.  Rhode Island is reneging on promises to workers, they say.  Bob Walsh, Executive Director of the National Education Association of Rhode Island, goes so far as to insist

What they did was illegal.  We’re deep into a real assault on labor.  It worries me that people who purport themselves as Democrats do this.

Never mind that there’s nothing at all illegal about these changes.  It’s a well-established principle in American jurisprudence that when the conditions extant when a contract was agreed (stipulating arguendo that the agreement was made in good faith by all parties) no longer exist, or have so radically changed that the terms can no longer be met, the contract can be abrogated and either a new one negotiated or the parties involved go their separate ways.  In extreme cases, this is what bankruptcy achieves; although, when the conditions have changed as radically as these have, bankruptcy isn’t necessary.

Never mind, also, these are promises that couldn’t be kept in any event, and both the state government and the public “service” unions at the time knew they could not be kept.  Or they blindly believed real hard in government’s ability to keep collecting funds from…somewhere.  Tinker Bell is alive and well in Public Service Land.

Never mind, finally, that this public “service” union greed at the expense of taxpayers makes “labor” a valid target.

One tear-jerker that the unions are trotting out is this:

North Providence retiree Jamie Reilly left her job as a secretary at age 50 [remember that raising of the retirement age?], thinking her 30 years of state employment would mean good benefits during her later years.  But now she said she may be forced to re-enter the workforce at age 55 because the state has put off pension increases.

“I counted on that money,” Reilly said….  “You work all your life and you plan, and they take it away from you.”

Worked all her life?  She worked 30 years and wanted to be retired for 40.  Workers in the private sector don’t get it that easy; they work until they’re in their mid-60s—a working life 50% longer.

And this one:

Cranston firefighter Dean Brockway said higher retirement ages mean he will have to work several years longer than he expected, and he wonders how he’ll climb stairs in heavy gear in his 60s.

“Could I do something else? I don’t know,” he said. “A lot of us chose to dedicate our lives to public service because to us it’s an honor.  Could I be a carpenter?  I don’t think so. This is what I do.”

Brockway has a legitimate concern, but it’s no different from the concerns of a private sector employee whose work is primarily physical labor.  But if he’s not going to look for alternatives, if he’s not going to try to retrain into something less physically demanding (certainly no stroll in the park for a middle-aged or older person, but assuredly not impossible), he loses sympathy for his plight, which begins to be self-imposed.  Certainly, there’s no more obligation for Rhode Island’s citizens to indemnify him against the outcomes of his choices than there is for them to indemnify similarly situated private sector employees.

Raimondo understands this in all its practicalities—how affordable are the existing programs:

These problems won’t go away.  The longer you wait, the bigger the problems get.  People looking for easy, short-term solutions. … Well, there are none.

Raimondo doesn’t believe in Tinker Bell.