Tag Archives: political parties

More Overregulation

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More fallout from Dodd-Frank: these regulators now are about to promulgate a rule set that requires companies to sequester bonuses paid to their executives for some period of years before those execs can collect their bonuses.

Aside from interfering with decisions that are wholly internal to a business and so none of the government’s business, there are other problems with this set.  This rule set will

govern pay to risk-taking executives who are in a position to do material damage to their companies.

In addition to extending the deferral window, regulators want to broaden the pool of bank employees subject to the new rules by expanding the definition of risk taker to include factors like the amount of money an employee handles.

Never mind that risk is part of business, and there already are Federal, and State, laws extant that deal with both fraud negligence in this area.  Never mind that shareholder suits, or the threat of them, also already exist as a market mechanism for adequately managing risk-taking.

There’s also this:

…how to balance risk with reward in compensation arrangements that will apply to a cross section of banks, investment advisers, broker dealers, credit unions and executives at mortgage-finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  …

“Trying to come up with a rule that can be uniformly applied to a set of highly diverse players in the financial-services industry was always just going to be very difficult,” said Kyoko Lin, a partner at law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP.

Well, NSS.  This is yet another reason government has no business meddling in the market place.

Spendthrifting Forever

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Or is it just narcissism?

President Obama sought to increase the amount of money available for the federal government to spend on former presidents in advance of his White House exit.

In his budget requests for fiscal years 2016 and 2017, Obama proposed hikes in the appropriations for expenditures of former presidents….

To the tune of a $600,000 increase—18%—in this spending.  No doubt the job of President is stressful; one has only to look at how much the last two—Bush the Younger and Obama, both relatively young men on their first election—aged over their mere eight years in office.  But none of this increase, nor any of the baseline of roughly $3.2 million, is intended to cover health related costs.  No, the money is intended for life style, protection details, libraries, and the like.

Notice, too that no existing ex-President has asked for an increase in such monies, not Jimmie Carter with his health problems, not Bush the Elder and his age-related health problems, not Bill Clinton, not Bush the Younger.  Only Obama wants more money, and he’s not even ex yet, just preparing to be.

Hmm….

Regarding Flint

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EPA Region 5 Administrator Susan Hedman, who resigned in February, explained to Congress on Tuesday that “during the summer and fall of 2015 the Region 5 Flint team actively evaluated and reevaluated the enforcement options available.”  But she chose not to intervene in September because she worried that the Michigan Attorney General might sue the agency.  When have legal risks ever stopped the EPA?

The Wall Street Journal has a valid question.  But both the editorial staff and the EPA ignore another matter: the publicity of a Michigan AG lawsuit against the EPA would have resulted in a high level of public oversight of the EPA, of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, and of Flint’s tap water.

It Doesn’t Get Any Clearer Than This

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Ex-First Lady, Ex-Secretary of State, Public (but no transcripts available) Speaker Par Excellence, and Progressive-Democrat Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton has known the non-secure nature of her cell phone for quite some time.  And since she knew this much, she’s known all along the non-secure nature of her personal email server through which she handled so much classified information, to say nothing of all the OPSEC and COMSEC information that she handled via her server.

Here’s proof.

 

H/t Fox News Insider

The House Budget Blueprint On Offer

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The debate is well worth having.

House conservatives have vowed to block a fiscal 2017 budget put forth by Republican leadership Tuesday, saying it doesn’t cut spending enough and creating uncertainty over the GOP’s ability to pass a fiscal blueprint this year.

Never mind that the blueprint cuts spending by $6.5 trillion over the next 10 years and, if future Congresses stick to the plan would eliminate deficits and so permit beginning to pay down the nation’s $19 trillion debt.  The cuts in the first year of these 10 years don’t go far enough to suit these self-styled conservatives (small-c, you’ll note).

It’s certainly true that real cuts in the hand are worth two (or more) promised cuts in later years; however, this is the first budget plan in decades that actually, explicitly promises those later cuts and to that concrete end.

But: as these guys consider blowing up another budget plan, they need to ask themselves how much spending they’ll be able to cut if they force a plan that has no hope of being enacted?  What do they think will be the value of their political symbolism?