Tag Archives: government

A Sense of Privacy

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Last week, the House voted, largely along party lines, to abolish the American Community Survey, the new version of the US Census Bureau’s long-form questionnaire, a survey that was supposed to be conducted annually, The Wall Street Journal reports.  Republicans claim the long form—asking about everything from demographics to income to commuting times—is prying into private life and is unconstitutional.  Oddly, the WSJ disputes this characterization.

That paper says,

[T]he ACS provides some of the most accurate, objective and granular data about the economy and the American people, in something approaching real time.  Ideally, Congress would use the information to make good decisions.  Or economists and social scientists draw on the resource to offer better suggestions.  Businesses also depend on the ACS’s county-by-county statistics to inform investment and hiring decisions.

But the WSJ is living in a fantasy world, as demonstrated by that adverb “Ideally.”  In the real world, we’ve seen the likelihood of “good decisions” (question for the WSJ: whose definition of “good?”) involving personal information emanating from Congress.  We’ve seen the quality of suggestions from the HSWIC* over in the government’s Energy Department.  As for the businesses, see below.

Leaving that aside, though, in the real world, stipulating the argument, the ACS still is an intrusion into my privacy.

The WSJ even shamelessly trades on its “authority” status:

National statistics are in some sense public goods, which is why the government has other data-gathering shops like the Bureaus of Economic Analysis and Labor Statistics.

In the first place, they’re not goods of any sort, much less this baldly asserted public version, until they’ve been collected and thereby gained existence.  Even then, no, they’re not “public goods,” solely because they’ve been collected from a broad public.  They’re still made up of personal—private—data; having been collected up into a common database in no way places them into the commons.  In the second place, the WSJ has just made an excellent argument for abolishing the Bureaus of Economic Analysis and Labor Statistics, also.

In the end, if these data have value for businesses, or any other entity, a market will develop for them (they’re not that hard to collect, and the barrier to entry into this market is, as my town puts it, speed cushions), and people can give up their personal data—or not—in accordance with their own decisions.  There’s no need to have these data confiscated by government fiat.

But the most amazing part of the WSJ‘s demurral is their rationale:

As for privacy, anyone not living in a Unabomber shack won’t be much inconvenienced by making this civic contribution.

Leaving aside the cynically Alinsky-esque claim that a confiscation is a “contribution,” when did individual privacy become something to be invaded at will, so long as it doesn’t “inconvenience” the victim?  Our privacy needs no justification from us to protect; we need no better reason to protect it—especially from a grasping government that’s supposed to be working for us—than that we don’t feel like being exposed.  The WSJ‘s logic is in line with the government’s logic of two centuries ago: the Indians aren’t using the land they’re on, anyway.  And we have a more important use for it than they do.

The inconvenience is the invasion of our privacy.  Full stop.

 

*HSWIC: Head…Scientist…What’s in Charge

Is Anyone Paying Attention?

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Over in California, we have this:

  • California Controller John Chiang reported that April 2012 tax collections fell short of that state’s government projections by more than 20%—$2.44 billion.
  • Personal income tax payments were below that state’s government (specifically, Governor Jerry Brown’s) projections by 21.5%—$2 billion.

This, and other “estimating” errors have led to a new budget shortfall estimate of $16 billion—up 77% from an estimate of a bit over $9 billion from just four months ago in January.

To solve this shortfall problem, California’s state government is in the middle of a campaign to get voters who still remain in California to raise the taxes they pay: pushing their sales tax to 7.5% from its current 7.25% and pushing their top marginal income-tax rate to 13.3% from 10.3%.

We also have this going on invis-à-vis California:

  • Since 2009, the business departures from California has gone up by a factor of five.
  • Chief Executive magazine’s annual survey of CEOs, carried in the May issue, found California last in business climate of all the states in the union.

If anyone in that government is paying attention, are they capable of understanding?

Demand for Admiration

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I wrote, below, about Progressives’ need for personal acclaim in their community “organizing” efforts.

Here’s an example of that desperation for recognition in another milieu.  It’s now a legal requirement to give credit to a Progressive for the “good deed” a business might do.

As background, under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,

insurers that don’t spend a specified amount of revenue on actual medical care—as opposed to administrative costs—must refund the difference to customers.

Now the requirement for hosannas:

Health-insurance companies must tell customers who get a premium rebate this summer that the check is the result of the Obama administration’s health-care law, according to federal guidelines released Friday [11 May].”

Rules…instruct insurers to notify recipients of rebates in the first paragraph of the mailing by writing: “This letter is to inform you that you will receive a rebate of a portion of your health insurance premiums.  This rebate is required by the Affordable Care Act—the health reform law.”

Moreover,

Insurers will also have to send a generalized letter to all other customers explaining that if they aren’t receiving a rebate, it is because the company has met the targets under the law.

Finally, Obama, as part of his Progressive Education Movement, is using his Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, to push doctors “to educate people” about the benefits of the law.

Update: Just how desperate can these guys get?

Some Economics Numbers

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Last April, the Federal government collected $319 billion in taxes and other revenue, which compared to April’s spending of $260 billion, represents a budget surplus of $59 billion—the first budget surplus in this administration’s history.

Last April, those $319 billion in taxes and other revenue compared to the $404 billion in total revenue collected in April 2008.

Last April, The Federal government collected $179 billion in personal income taxes and $28 billion in corporate income taxes.

In early May, the Federal government had accumulated $15.7 trillion in total debt, or more than $138 thousand per taxpayer.  Of that debt, $5 trillion is held by foreign countries.

By early May, the national Debt to GDP ratio was 104%.

Through early May, the Federal government was running a budget deficit of $1.3 trillion and rising—never mind that one-month surplus.

Through early May, the Federal government had spent $1.5 trillion on Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid.

Through early May, the Federal government revenues to GDP ratio was 32%—revenues collected represented a value equal to 32% of our nation’s total economic output.

Through early May, the Federal government spending to GDP ratio was 45%.

 

Think about those.

There’s Growth and then there’s Growth

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The outcomes of the Greek and French elections last week, serve to emphasize a perceived, and real, need for economic growth.  That need exists in the US, also; those elections serve to highlight our need, as well.

But what kind of growth is intended?  Carsten Volkery hints at the version preferred by the Left in Europe (and, I submit, it’s a view shared by our Progressives, here at home; accordingly, I’ll just write about Europe in this post and incorporate our Progressives by extension).

Volkery opens his description of the Left’s version of growth this way.

[The European fiscal pact, an effort at national budget discipline] will, however, be augmented by a separate “growth pact.”  It is currently unclear just what form this growth pact will take.  But it seems safe to assume that it will not be particularly ambitious—European leaders want to stimulate the economy without putting too much strain on their budgets.  Massive debt-financed investments are still regarded as a taboo. Additional transfers from the wealthy north to the impoverished south also seem unlikely.  It is, in short, unclear if Europe can even afford growth.

Stimulate the economy through their budgets.  Can Europe afford growth?  I.e., more government spending of some sort.  Volkery then suggests some ways to achieve this greater spending, this “growth.”

Relax the austerity targets…domestic demand would benefit….

But this Keynesian adherents’ conflation of a government-fueled artificial demand with the true economic demand of a nation’s private economic participants—the citizens and their businesses—has already been proven to result in failure to stimulate anything beyond growth in government: here in the US in the 1930s and again in the years since 2008, and in Europe in that same post-2008 era.

Cheap money from the ECB…cut interest rates further, which would stimulate demand.

The US Fed has been holding interest rates artificially low, to the point of going negative in real terms, for years.  No demand stimulus has resulted.  Further, cheap borrowing still is more debt, the wrong answer for an economic dislocation caused by too much borrowing.

Structural reforms…liberalizing the labor market, increasing the retirement age and reducing barriers to trade [to] increase competitiveness, and…stimulate the economy.  Such reforms only have one problem: they don’t help much in the short term.

This is true enough, but it’s not an argument to not implement the reforms; it’s an argument to stop dithering about them, and get them in place.  As the reforms take effect, government’s intrusion into their citizens’ lives will be reduced, they’ll have more room for their own decisions—and more money with which to act on those decisions.  More true economic demand.

EU investments: These could take different forms.

And every one of them amounts to increased government spending, increased government borrowing, or increased government selection of business winners and losers, or all three.

No, the only growth each of these various plans for increasing government spending and borrowing can stimulate is in the size of government’s debt and the size of government and its intrusion into the lives of men and women.

To truly stimulate growth in economies, what is needed is not budget discipline through reduced government spending and increased taxes, but budget discipline through reduced government spending and reduced taxes on a broadened tax base, and reduced government borrowing.  Most especially, there’s no room for increasing (again) government spending or borrowing.

The more money that is left in the hands of the people who’ve earned it, the more freedom those people will have to set their own goals, to develop their own ideas, to do their own innovation, to form their own small businesses—and to hire even just one or two or three others to work in their businesses.  In the aggregate of all these burgeoning small businesses is the growth of employment—with even more money in the hands of those earning it.

The less government competition for goods and services—and labor—the lower prices will be, and so the money left in the hands of those earning it will go farther—further stimulating economic growth.  Yes, those lower prices will impact those small businesses, but those lower prices will impact  their supply prices, too.  The businesses will thrive with the growing demand from that increase in money and decrease in prices—costs.

There’s another effect from reduced government spending that’s often overlooked.  Government spending often serves to substitute for individual spending: why should a person buy this or that good or service, if government is going to buy it for him?  Less spending reduces this substitution effect, putting the money back into the private economy where it belongs.

With more people having skin in the game—from everyone being taxed, for instance, even at those reduced rates—more people will play an active role in their own lives and in the politics that, ultimately, structure their lives.  This is entirely appropriate.  A free people must be politically active, or they lose their freedoms.  Pericles and Plato were right on this.