Tag Archives: morality

More Sequester Obama-Style

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President Barack Obama’s unions get theirs, and the rest of us can just go cling.  Plainly, his publicly pronounced “directives” are just Obamatalk.

The Internal Revenue Service is about to pay $70 million in employee bonuses despite an Obama administration directive to cancel discretionary bonuses because of automatic spending cuts enacted this year[.]

That directive was written by none other than the IRS’ current acting MFWIC, Danny Werfel, when he was Controller of President Barack Obama’s Office of Management and Budget.  The irony.  The irony.

Senator Chuck Grassley (R, IA) has the right of it:

The IRS always claims to be short on resources.  But it appears to have $70 million for union bonuses.  And it appears to be making an extra effort to give the bonuses despite opportunities to renegotiate with the union and federal instruction to cease discretionary bonuses during sequestration.

The IRS also has millions to spend on lavish “conferences” and on targeting groups and individuals with whose politics Obama disagrees.

Too Big to Handle

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I’ve written before about the morality of government welfare as a first resort.  Here’s a practical reason for cutting back: it’s too big to manage effectively.  Here are some failures from that too big to handle:

A postal worker who ran marathons found her race times improved after she began drawing federal disability checks for an alleged back injury.

Another disabled federal employee went scuba diving, skied in Switzerland and did flips on a trapeze.  She spent part of her $193,000 in disability payments on a boat named “Free Ride” before she was caught.

A Justice Department lawyer collected $90,000 in annual disability checks after claiming the stress of his job kept him off the job.  Apparently the cable TV show he began hosting while drawing disability pay wasn’t so stressful.

And

15,000 recipients are 66 or older.  Six of them are over the age of 100—well past retirement age.

The Federal government compounds this by being disinterested in controlling the failures and the resulting waste of taxpayer wealth being redistributed.

funding for all agencies—about $3 billion per year—is automatically appropriated and run through the Department of Labor.

And

the federal [disability] program does not require employing agencies to order a second opinion. The claimant can pick his own doctor.

If his claim is rejected, he can file for a different disability, as often as he likes.

And

The Department of Labor, which administers FECA for 70 federal entities, doesn’t track fraud referrals and convictions[.]

The program is too large to be properly controlled, and it needs drastic paring back for economic and legal reasons as well as moral.

A Thought on Disparate Impact

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There is another disparate impact case wending its way to the Supreme Court; hopefully, this one actually will be argued, and the Court will come to a right decision.  The case is Township of Mount Holly v Mount Holly Gardens Citizens, and it concerns Mount Holly, NJ’s, plan to

redevelop a housing project afflicted with crime, overcrowding and property code violations.

Naturally, some of the affected renters sued, and importantly here, they’re claiming no intent to discriminate on the part of the township or the redevelopers.  They’re just saying that, because most of the folks impacted are minority, there must be racism in there somewhere.

No racism actually is present, so we’ll make some up.  Because the redevelopment will inconvenience us.

But that’s the purpose of disparate impact, generally.

Racism of the Federal Government

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Here’s another example of the WilsonianObaman government’s racism.

The EEOC is haling Dollar General and a US unit of BMW into court, charging them with racism for the heinous practice—seriously—of using background checks to screen those convicted of

Murder, Assault & Battery, Rape, Child Abuse, Spousal Abuse (Domestic Violence), Manufacturing of Drugs, Distribution of Drugs, [and] Weapons Violations

from job applications.

Just to add racism to the EEOC’s racism, in the BMW case, there’s this: 70 black and 18 non-black contractors had criminal convictions, and the company declined to hire any of them.  The EEOC is only suing over the blacks’ non-hiring.  The non-blacks can go hang.

Indeed, the President Barack Obama’s EEOC has proudly codified its racism.  It said just last April that

an employer’s evidence of a racially balanced workforce will not be enough to disprove disparate impact.

Don’t worry about the inherently racist nature of disparate impact.  Such a worry would be racist.