Tag Archives: politics

“About That ‘Gutting the Safety Net'”

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That’s the title of a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Critics are accusing President Trump’s 2018 budget of “gutting the safety net” with cuts to food stamps and disability insurance. In reality, the White House is proposing long-needed reforms that would fix a dysfunctional disability system that traps Americans in dependency.

The editor is right as far as he goes, but he doesn’t go far enough.  It isn’t just our social security disability system that is a welfare trap, it’s our entire welfare system.

There is no incentive for folks to get off welfare; in fact, there is a “welfare cliff” designed in that throws up terrible obstacles blocking folks from getting off welfare.  Those obstacles are more concretely illustrated by this:

The less-noticed harm is that a mere 1% of beneficiaries return to work every year….

One reason so few return to the labor force is that payments are essentially a tax on work. A 55-year-old who previously earned about $30,000 a year at work could receive more than $15,000 a year in disability payments, plus health-care benefits and perhaps other cash transfers such as food stamps. That means any job would have to pay more than what he loses in subsidies….

It’s not a safety net.  It’s the Progressive-Democratic Party’s seine, with which it seeks to trap our poor so they can continue trading handouts for votes.

On Whose Side Are These Guys?

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There is a move afoot in Congress to “overhaul” Dodd-Frank, at least to the point of adjusting the threshold size that banks would need to exceed in order to become subject to strict rules on “the capital, mergers, and other business” in which Government will permit these otherwise private enterprises to engage.  Under the present threshold of $50 billion or more in assets, some 37 financial institutions are subject to such Government diktat.

The trick will be reaching a compromise on what should come next.

Republicans tend to favor either setting a threshold of between $250 billion and $500 billion, or basing the designation on a bank’s riskiness rather than on its size. That new range would leave around a dozen or as few as a half-dozen banks facing stricter regulation.

No, there must be no compromise. Strict elimination of Dodd-Frank should come next.

Worse, raising the threshold would, indeed, shrink the number of institutions subject to Government regulation. That, though, would make it easier for Government to expand to completion its control over these institutions.

That’s the stuff of corporate fascism: Government control over what a putatively private enterprise will be allowed to produce and how much of it that enterprise will be allowed.  It’s dismaying that Republicans would propose such an affront to free enterprise and limited government.

Disingenuousity in Asia

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Japan is working with the US to develop its own ballistic missile defenses, including one that can defeat incoming ICBMs.  The People’s Republic of China doesn’t like that.

Addressing a monthly press briefing at China’s Defense Ministry recently, spokesman Ren Guoqiang said Japan’s development of advanced radar systems designed to counteract incoming ballistic missiles would have a negative impact on strategic stability and damage trust between nations in the region.

Because a sound defense is a destabilizing threat to peace.  Because every nation being able to defend itself means no one can trust anyone—there’s no offensive threat with which to force “trust.”

Sure.

Never mind that, in addition to the PRC’s rapid development of its own nuclear offensive capabilities, including mobile ICBM systems and tunnel systems in which to secrete them; the PRC’s aggressions against Japanese islands in the East China Sea; and the PRC’s active occupation of the South China Sea and other nations’ islands within it, the PRC has been actively supporting (successfully) northern Korea’s drive to develop its own nuclear weapons and (nearing success) northern Korea’s drive to develop missile systems—including intercontinental-capable missiles—with which to deliver those nuclear warheads.

No, the only thing being destabilized is the PRC’s ability to threaten, to intimidate, other nations.

Constituents

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Who are a Federal judge’s—at any level of the judicial hierarchy—constituents?  I asked this question of a number of folks, and the most cogent answer I got was this: “in order, the law and justice.”  Even that answer, though, is only about one-third right IMNSHO.

Here is the first oath of office Federal judge and Justice must take; it’s the same as any Congressman must take.

I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.

Here is the additional oath of office that a Federal judge or Justice must take.  Notice that his prior oath does not expire (no oath can); this oath adds to it.

I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as [judicial position] under the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God.

Here is what Article I, Section 1 of our Constitution says about legislative authority.

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Thus, a Federal judge’s constituency begins and ends with the Constitution.  Full stop.  His constituency does not extend to “the law,” only to the supreme Law of the Land.  All other law, which can be enacted only by the people’s elected representatives in the legislative and executive branches under our system of governance, must be subordinate to and compatible with the Constitution.  A judge’s duty here is to reject a law that is not compatible, that is unconstitutional.  Or on its constitutionality, to apply it as it’s written.  His oaths of office demand he defend the Constitution, and that defense enjoins him to not write law, not modify law, only to apply it.  To this end, a judge’s interpretation of a law is only for the purpose of applying it as written, not to “interpret” it to his convenient end.

Not “justice,” either.  What is justice, what is just, are social and political determinations, and those determinations, too, can be made only by We the People, directly or through those elected representatives of ours.  A judge can only apply the law before him as it is written (or strike it); he cannot judge a case according to his own sense of justice or social mores.  He certainly can rail against the injustice (from his sense of it) of a ruling to which the law before him drives him—and he should—but he can rule in no other way but what the law itself requires.

This makes especially reprehensible the 4th Circuit’s ruling on President Donald Trump’s immigration Executive Order.

It is therefore difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Fourth Circuit and the other courts that have stayed Mr Trump’s executive orders on immigration are engaged in the judicial equivalent of the “resistance” to his presidency. Judges are, in effect, punishing the American electorate for having chosen the wrong president. That is not the judiciary’s role. Every federal judge has an obligation to accept the limitations imposed by the Constitution on his power—to exercise “neither force nor will, but merely judgment,” as Hamilton put it in Federalist No 78.

Medicaid Transfers

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It’s well understood that Medicaid badly wants reform.  My own view is to give it back to the States by reducing Federal fund transfers to them until the transfers are zero, which also would eliminate Federal strings jerking the States to do everything the same way, the Federal way.

There are lots of paths to that end, and there are a number of other reforms that would help the situation at least a little.  The House plan for repeal and replace of Obamacare, the first step of which was the American Health Care Act, has one such step, the repeal of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.

Expanding State participation in Federally provided—with those strings attached—funds—expanding Medicaid—as a number State governors have done, is not one of those reforms.  Not even for Republican governors.

Sixteen GOP governors represent states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, and they are generally loath to see the program cut back.

Nobody forced these persons to mainline the Federal funds drug. They stuck that needle in their veins and addicted themselves, with no outside pressure at all.

These guys are badly mistaken, and they’ve only made things worse for the constituents for whom they claim to work.

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, one of those 16, thinks the expansion is just peachy keen; he’s still riding the high from his needle.  He says that “600,000 Michiganders have gained coverage and the state’s hospitals have saved about $300 million.”

What he’s carefully ignoring, though, is how much money Michiganders and those hospitals sent to the Federal government in various taxes and fees to contribute to 49 other States’ Medicaid program participation.  How many of those Michiganders could have been helped and how much money could Michigan’s hospitals have saved had the State kept those monies, instead?  How much would those Michigan citizens and those Michigan hospitals have benefited, had they been able to keep their money—their money, not the State or Federal government’s money—instead of paying all those taxes and fees to the Federal government?