Tag Archives: politics

Construction Union Vig

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In California last week, legislators and interest groups declared dead a measure…to allow certain apartments with some low-income units to sidestep the state’s environmental review process. That followed a failed effort by state lawmakers in New York earlier this year to renew a widely used tax break for rental housing in New York City….

For both measures, construction unions were key to the defeat, as they won over key allies with their argument that the government shouldn’t be aiding apartment development without also guaranteeing union-level wages.

Let’s see, low income housing, union wages.  Union wages, low income housing.

Union wages add some 20% to the cost of residential construction in California and New York.  Low income folks—who have the lowest ability to pay up; even union leadership understands that tautology—are being gouged by these unions.

That 20% is the vig low income folks must pay to have housing.  Alternatively, that 20% is the vig others must pay to subsidize low income housing.

Nice construction project you got there, really cool that it’s for the less fortunate.  Be too bad if something were to happen to it.

Speaking of Hiding Things

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From Rick Moran, of PJMedia, came this bit.  He quoted from The Daily Caller:

DCLeaks, a website that releases information on powerful political figures, has had its Twitter account suspended and part of its website taken offline after releasing a cache of documents on billionaire donor George Soros.

The website had previously released 2,500 internal Open Society Foundation (OSF) documents in order to “shed light on one of the most influential networks operating worldwide.” OSF is one of Soros’ networks of organizations.

Moran added his own critique to this:

This was a surgical operation, taking down one specific part of a website and leaning on Twitter to suspend the account. For someone with the resources of George Soros, it was a piece of cake.

Despite the fact that the documents leaked were sheer dynamite, there was a curious lack of, well, curiosity on the part of the media to dig into them.

Now we know why.

Indeed, but frankly, the press doesn’t need much persuasion from the Soroses of the world.  The press already is in the bag for Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and the stuff DCLeaks exposed would be very damaging to Clinton as well as to Soros’ OSF were the press to pursue these leads rather than spiking them.

The question remains, though: what is it that George Soros, funder of Progressives and Big Government Mavens, is trying to hide?

A Question of Cash

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Kenneth Rogoff, Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University and ex-Chief Economist of the IMF, thinks we should get rid of most of the cash—paper currency—we have in circulation.  Rogoff claims to not want to do away with cash altogether, but regardless of his goal, it’s clear that eliminating a particular cash instrument can only be a first step and not a last one.

[P]aper currency lies at the heart of some of today’s most intractable public-finance and monetary problems. Getting rid of most of it—that is, moving to a society where cash is used less frequently and mainly for small transactions—could be a big help.

Really?  Hmm….

There is little debate among law-enforcement agencies that paper currency, especially large notes such as the US $100 bill, facilitates crime: racketeering, extortion, money laundering, drug and human trafficking, the corruption of public officials, not to mention terrorism.

This would matter if we had a fundamentally criminal society operating in a fundamentally criminal economy.  We have, though, a nearly $18 trillion economy, and crime—crime where cash matters, which is largely limited to the categories identified above, don’t play that big a role.  This is not to say that these crime types aren’t worth worrying about, but it’s better to deal with the crimes themselves rather than manipulate our cash forms or availability.

But Rogoff gives the game away with this:

According to the Internal Revenue Service, a lot of the action is concentrated in small cash-intensive businesses, where it is difficult to verify sales and the self-reporting of income. By contrast, businesses that take payments mostly by check, bank card or electronic transfer know that it is much easier for tax authorities to catch them dissembling.

That’s the rub.  Reducing the availability of instruments for cash transactions—pushing ordinary American citizens into transaction mechanisms which Government can track—facilitates exactly that: Government tracking of the activities of American citizens, a tracking in which Government most assuredly engages, sometimes for legitimate reasons, but far too often for no better reason than that a bureaucrat has a prurient interest.  And worse, because Government dislikes particular groups of Americans and so engages in any fishing expedition it thinks it can get away with.

The upshot of restricting cash instruments, then, is that everyone gets punished for the misbehavior of the few, and worse, the power of Government to track our private doings, for any purpose at all to which a bureaucrat might take a notion, is enhanced.

How very Progressive of Rogoff.

What’s Scaring Her So Much?

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Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, with the active support of the State Department which she used to lead, is refusing to release all of her State Department daily schedules until after the elections this fall.  These schedules would reveal with whom she met, for how long, and on what (claimed) subjects.  While some of those schedules have been released already (not voluntarily, but only under court order pursuant to an AP FOIA request that had to be satisfied via AP’s lawsuit), she—and State—are slow walking the release of the rest.  Now why would that be?

Recall that the daily schedules so far released demonstrate that while Secretary of State, Clinton met with or had telephone conversations with thousands of diplomats, other foreign dignitaries, Federal employees, and the like.  The released schedules also demonstrate that Clinton met with 154 private individuals, 85 of whom had given, in aggregate, more than $155 million to her Clinton Foundation.

The Clinton campaign has accused the AP of “cherry picking” schedules by focusing on those 154 individuals, saying that these folks are a tiny per centage of the meetings and telephone calls Clinton had as Secretary of State.

The campaign is correct, as a matter of third grade arithmetic, that those private individuals are a tiny per centage of the total.  What the campaign is carefully ignoring, though, is that Secretary Clinton was obligated to meet or otherwise talk with those thousands of diplomats, other foreign dignitaries, Federal employees, and the like.

What the campaign also is carefully ignoring is that Secretary Clinton was obligated to meet or otherwise talk with zero per cent of those 154 individuals; instead those 154 represent 100% of a population 55% of whom had given her Foundation those $155+ million.

This is of a piece with Clinton’s private email server, on which she conducted official State Department business, and which she had set up for the avowed purpose of concealing her emails from public scrutiny.

What is Clinton so desperate to hide?

Pay to Play, or Slants

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From a Kimberley Strassel column in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal comes this nugget.

…the Associated Press’s extraordinary finding this week that of the 154 outside people Mrs. Clinton met with in the first years of her tenure, more than half were Clinton Foundation donors. Clinton apologists, like Vox’s Matthew Yglesias, are claiming that statistic is overblown, because the 154 doesn’t include thousands of meetings held with foreign diplomats and U.S. officials.

Nice try. As the nation’s top diplomat, Mrs Clinton was obliged to meet with diplomats and officials—not with others. Only a blessed few outsiders scored meetings with the harried secretary of state and, surprise, most of the blessed were Clinton Foundation donors.

What she said.

And yet the NLMSM insists—brags, really—that it’s entirely appropriate to take sides against Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump, not in their opinion pieces, but in their “fact” reporting pieces, also.  Objective journalism be damned.

Here’s Ezra Klein, of JournoList infamy:

The media has felt increasingly free to cover Trump as an alien, dangerous, and dishonest phenomenon[.]

And Jim Rutenberg of The New York Times:

If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?

It’s made starkly clear by Jorge Ramos, of Univision:

…journalists cannot be objective when they are confronted with “racism, discrimination, corruption, public life, dictatorships or violations of human rights.”

These views of Trump, in opinion pieces, are entirely legitimate, but it’s interesting to note that none of this criticism, this assumption of nefariousness, is evident in the same press’ coverage of Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, despite her plain lawlessness and her evident conflicts of interest.

If the press feels free to be this proudly biased against one party, one candidate, it can only feel free to be similarly biased toward any other politician, any other party.  Too much of the Fourth Estate has transformed itself into a fifth column.